Incentivising Participation in Liquid Democracy with Breadth-First Delegation

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Liquid democracy allows members of an electorate to either directly vote over, or delegate their voting rights to someone they trust. Most of liquid democracy literature and implementations allow each voter to only one delegate per election. However, if that delegate abstains, voting rights assigned to her are left unused. To minimise the number of delegations, it has been suggested that each voter should declare a ranking over voters she trusts. In this paper, we show that even if rankings over voters are declared, the standard delegation method of democracy remains problematic. More specifically, we show that when rankings over voters are declared, it could be undesirable to receive voting rights, which is contrary to what liquid democracy relies on. To solve this issue, we propose a new method to voting rights in an election, called breadth-first delegation., the proposed method prioritises assigning voting rights to closely connected to the voters who delegate.