Brief Announcement: Statement Voting and Liquid Democracy

The existing (election) voting systems, e.g., representative democracy, have many limitations and often fail to serve the best interest of the people in collective decision making. To address this issue, the concept of liquid democracy has been emerging as an alternative decision-making model to make better use of "the wisdom of crowds". Very recently, a few liquid democracy implementations, e.g. Google Votes and Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), are released; however, those systems only focus on the functionality aspect, as no privacy/anonymity is considered. In this work, we, for the first time, provide a rigorous study of liquid democracy under the Universal Composability (UC) frame- work. In the literature, liquid democracy was achieved via two separate stages -- delegation and voting. We propose an efficient liquid democracy e-voting scheme that uni es these two stages. At the core of our design is a new voting concept called statement voting, which can be viewed as a natural extension of the conventional voting approaches. We remark that our statement voting can be extended to enable more complex voting and generic ledger-based non-interactive multi-party computation. We believe that the statement voting concept opens a door for constructing a new class of e-voting schemes.