Dimitrios Karoukis | Searcharxiv

arXiv2023

Publicly verifiable delegative democracy with secret voting power

In a democratic setting, we introduce a commitment scheme which allows for transparent validation of transfers and reversible delegations of voting power between citizens without sacrificing their privacy. A unit of voting power is publicly represented by the Merkle root of a tree consisting of its latest owner's public key, a random nonce and the Merkle root of the tree of its previous owner's public key and random nonce and so on. A transition includes the input units, their owner's public keys and signatures, the hashes of their nonces and the output units generated with the new owners' public keys and random nonces. In case of a delegation, the receiver provides the sender with the hashed random nonces and hashed public keys for the output units. In case of a transfer, only the precomputed output units are provided by the receiver. In a reversal, a historical owner reveals the hashes of the nonces and public keys that resulted in the subsequent units. To vote, the owner reveals the actual nonces and public keys.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Deliberative Democracy with Dilutive Voting Power Sharing

We present a deliberation model where a group of individuals with heterogeneous preferences iteratively forms expert committees whose members are tasked with the updating of an exogenously given status quo change proposal. Every individual holds some initial voting power that is represented by a finite amount of indivisible units with some underlying value. Iterations happen in three stages. In the first stage, everyone decides which units to keep for themselves and where to distribute the rest. With every ownership mutation, a unit's underlying value diminishes by some exogenously given amount. In the second stage, the deliberative committee is formed by the individuals with the most accumulated voting power. These experts can author corrections to the proposal which are proportional to their accumulated power. In the third stage, if an individual outside of the committee disagrees with a correction, she can vote against it with their remaining voting power. A correction is discarded if more than half of the total voting power outside of the committee is against it. If either the committee or the proposal remain unchanged for two consecutive iterations, the process stops. We show that this will happen in finite time.

econ.TH↗