Evaluation of Verifiable Credential Delegation for Computer Agriculture Cooperative Governance Under Vote-Buying Pressure: An Artificial Intelligence Ballot-Secrecy Bound for Participatory Legitimacy

Computer agriculture cooperatives increasingly rely on digital governance platforms to allocate inputs, credit and extension services, yet the legitimacy of these platforms is undermined when vote-buying pressure compromises the secrecy of internal elections. the present analysis evaluates verifiable credential delegation as a mechanism for preserving ballot secrecy in cooperative governance under such pressure. The study is a design and power analysis of a before-after-control-impact (BACI) evaluation, not an empirical field trial. It characterises the operating characteristics of the BACI estimator under a declared variance structure with an intraclass correlation of 0.64, between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0 and residual standard deviation of 4.5. Power was estimated across 2000 replications per design cell for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The analysis indicates that 56 clusters are required to detect a 5 percentage point effect at 80% power. Verifiable credential delegation can bound ballot secrecy without eliminating the social visibility that makes vote-buying enforceable, and it specifies the institutional conditions under which that bound holds. The contribution is a formal governance bound linking cryptographic delegation to participatory legitimacy in agricultural cooperatives.