22 May 2023, Computational Social Choice Seminar, Markus Utke

Abstract

Liquid democracy is a novel voting scheme aiming at combining the idealistic appeal of direct democracy with the practicality of representative democracy. We examine liquid democracy with ranked delegations, where every voter can either vote for themselves or specify a ranking of trusted voters that they want to delegate their vote to. Delegations are transitive, so if A delegates to B and B to C, then C is assigned the voting power of both A and B and might even delegate it further. Different delegation rules that choose the representative of each voter were proposed for ranked delegations, however none of them can satisfy a specific set of four natural properties. We generalize the approach to fractional delegation rules, that can delegate partial votes to multiple trusted voters. We identify two characterizations of a fractional delegation rule satisfying (generalized versions of) all four properties and present a polynomial time algorithm for its computation.

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