Resilient Liquid Democracy: Mitigating Voting Power Imbalances via Secure Delegation Networks

Abstract: Liquid democracy promises to improve collective decision-making by allowing voters to vote directly, delegate their voting power to trusted participants, or combine both approaches through fallback mechanisms. However, existing deployments typically rely on transparent delegation, which exposes voters to popularity-driven herding, makes coercion verifiable, and introduces systemic fragility when highly-backed delegates abstain. In this paper, we propose a secure liquid democracy mechanism that resolves the tension between informed expertise routing and systemic robustness. We introduce a sealed delegation regime using decentralized timed-release encryption, which cryptographically hides delegation choices during the formation phase to prevent herding and coercion, while restoring full public auditability for the final tally. To address delegate failures, we extend the protocol with ranked multi-delegation and personal fallback ballots. We formally prove pre-reveal secrecy and resubmission receipt-freeness for our protocol. Finally, we evaluate the mechanism on four real datasets, a municipal participatory-budgeting election with a calibration survey, twenty further participatory-budgeting elections, and 60,000 US voters with an objective competence measure. They show that whether delegation improves representational accuracy follows a recoverable-gap law; it helps only when abstention is large and systematically unrepresentative, and is otherwise neutral or harmful, with representative-style delegation safer than delegating to a competence elite. The benefit of sealed formation is primarily structural, sharply reducing power concentration rather than directly improving accuracy; and ranked multi-delegation with personal fallback ballots sharply reduces vote loss under realistic and targeted delegate failures, a result that replicates across all twenty elections.