Voting with Private Delegation:

Background

A representative democracy model is frequently employed in many voting systems, where voting power is delegated to representatives who subsequently vote on behalf of the voters. This delegation model is also prevalent in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). However, even though some existing voting systems used in DAOs support private voting, they only offer public delegation. We introduce a protocol that enables private delegation of voting power. Voters can freely delegate, revoke, and re-delegate their power without revealing any information about who they delegated to; even the delegate does not learn who delegated to them. The only information that is recorded on chain is that the voter delegated or re-delegated their vote to someone. Our protocol accommodates both public and private voting for the delegates themselves. Our paper provides a UC proof of security for the voting system.

We implement our system as an extension of the existing smart contract, Governor Bravo, to enable private delegation. Furthermore, we provide an evaluation of our implementation that demonstrates the practical usability of the protocol. We find that the required operations execute in reasonable time on a consumer-grade laptop, with the most expensive operation, delegation, taking between 7 and 167 seconds depending on the level of privacy the user wants.

Materials