Running an octo (3-round swiss) tournament soon, and based on pre-registration, the bottom section will be full of unrated players. Wondering if I should expand the section size to last 10-15 players instead of 8 to allow unrated players to play against lower rated.
Running an 8 player section comprised entirely of unrated players should “probabaly” be fine.
These type of sections used to be an issue in the 1990s, and early 2000s before the ratings committee instituted rating initialization based on age. With these relatively new rating initialization algorithms, even sections made entirely of unrated players receive somewhat accurate post-tournament ratings.
The US Chess rating committe is made up of some of the brightest mathematicians, and programmers in the chess world so they have solved these type of issues for the most part.
They also have the advantage of decades of experience, and have seen numerous cases of rating manipulation in which they were able to use programming and mathematics to prevent the specific issue from happening again. Bloodgood is one of the more famous cases of rating manipulation within a small pool, but there are numerous other examples.
Someone from the rating committee may give you a more detailed answer than this one.
Hope this helps (not sure it did..)
Wishing your tournament a huge success.
Cheers.
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Unrated does not always mean beginner so putting them in with the lower rated might be an unpleasant surprise to them. Only three is technically unrated for pairing purposes but with unrateds you may want to use their provisional ratings. If the eight players are totally unrated then they will remain under the initial special rating formula for their next tournament (or next two).
If you really want, take the bottom octo, move the 1st, 4th, 5th and 8th highest rated players to another octo, and then fill both octos back up with the unrated players. Quads require players to be grouped by ratings with the bottom player of a quad rated at least as high as the top player of the next quad. Octos do not have that limitation. That gives both Octos the rated players needed to help an unrated get a somewhat correct initial rating while still giving all players the normal octo experience.
At a local quad a player answered the TD with a “he has never played rated chess.” Instead of drilling down on the questioning (the player had an accent) the TD saw that there was only one player with that name on USCF and paired him in one of the lower quads. What the player really meant was he never played in USCF rated chess and that is why he got a new membership (unrated). turned out he was a FIDE master – a strong one, too (right around 2500 USCF).
Many years ago I was at quad tournament where the TD took the word of a player that they were never USCF but he thought he was a pretty good player – he easily won - a few months later the TD realized the “new” player played enough USCF to get an established expert rating 
– TD gave the 3 other players in the quad a free entry to a future tournament as compensation for his mistake.
I once had 5 true unrateds or provisional show up for a two round tournament (probably was a G/70) – I asked the bottom 12 if any of them would object to playing 4 rounds at G/25 instead and they all agreed. If they hadn’t agreed I would have offered extra rated game in between rounds – there always seems to be at least a few games that get over within the first 60 minutes.
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