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

Liquid democracy lets voters either vote directly or delegate their voting power to another trusted participant. It is often deployed in political parties, municipal participation platforms, and the governance of decentralized autonomous organizations. Existing approaches make delegations publicly visible as they form, which results in herding driven by popularity, makes coercion verifiable, and leaves the election fragile when popular delegates abstain. We propose a novel 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 formed and before revealed in full for tallying. Each voter determines ranked backup delegates together with a personal fallback ballot so that delegation failures do not result in abstaining. Experiments grounded in real-world voting data show that the mechanism keeps voting power dispersed, whereas transparent formation concentrates it into few hands. Strikingly, vote loss under targeted delegate failures falls from 26% to 3%.