Short Paper: Ballot Secrecy for Liquid Democracy.

Certain advances in election technology, such as online voting, promise to reduce the administrative overhead of running an election. This has breathed new life into the idea of direct democracy, where voters play a more active role in setting legislation. However it is anticipated that a steady stream of referendums would generate voter fatigue. To combat this fatigue, voters could be allowed to delegate their votes to other (more knowledgeable) voters. This idea is old but has been recently reinvented under the name liquid democracy. In this paper, we consider how ballot secrecy should be defined for liquid democracy. We first show that a natural definition of full secrecy leads to several undesirable outcomes. We then show that these are very difficult to address without enabling voter coercion and vote buying. The purpose of the paper is not to affirm liquid democracy; rather, it is to raise awareness of unseen complexity hiding under our initial presumption that liquid democracy could effortlessly support a secret ballot.