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

Liquid democracy lets voters either vote directly or delegate their voting power to a trusted participant. Existing deployments make delegations publicly visible as they form, which invites popularity-driven herding, makes coercion verifiable, and leaves the election fragile when highly backed delegates abstain. We propose a liquid democracy mechanism that removes these vulnerabilities while keeping the tally fully auditable. Delegation choices are sealed with decentralized timed-release encryption while they are being formed and revealed in full for tallying, and each voter names ranked backup delegates together with a personal fallback ballot so that delegate failures do not silence them. We prove pre-reveal secrecy and resubmission receipt-freeness for the formation phase. Experiments grounded in real voting data show that the mechanism keeps voting power dispersed where transparent formation concentrates it into few hands, keeps outcomes stable under herding where transparent outcomes become a lottery on arrival order, and cuts vote loss under targeted delegate failures from 26% to about 3%. The experiments further characterize when delegation improves representational accuracy, namely when abstention is large, unrepresentative, and widely converted into delegation, giving deployments a concrete condition to assess.