Well, this is not a big person with any power, @deeanndmathews. This is a small person who is funding hundreds of accounts with 15 sp and having them down-vote with bots. Since none of those accounts post or comment, there is no way to hurt them in steem.
You can easily see this on steempeak by looking at downvotes on people's posts. Many, many posts now have 1-2 of these downvotes now. Some posts have 30+. I am not tracking this and usually ignore.But the smaller you are, and the more votes you got, the more likely you are to get multiple 10% downvotes.
I have collected a bit of data now from the 1-2 I get of this type, and my data agrees with yours -- the issue here is that we do not need anyone driving off new people that are hard enough to retain just for the purpose of doing so. In a decentralized setting perhaps nothing can be done, but do we KNOW that nothing can be done?
On the other hand, more ACTUAL curation is a more uplifting way to counter this foolishness ... so, perhaps the energy is best spent there.