Liquid democracy with multiple delegates
Most liquid democracy experiments fail because voters can only choose one delegate.
Andrew Furmanczyk described several shortcomings of current liquid democracy systems in DAOs — where voters can only choose one delegate:
[Liquid Democracy] doesn't solve the Ignorance problem (lack of knowledge to vote)" ... "Just because a proxy has been delegated votes, does not mean they will be an expert on all proposals they review.
Bandwidth problem (too many voices for one person to represent)
These two problems would be solved if we could delegate to more than one delegate.
Similarly, in this recent paper, Joe Campbell, Casella, de Lara, Mooers and Ravindran did an experiment where liquid democracy led to worse decisions. Voters overused the delegation, reducing the variety of independent information sources — compared to the group who did not have the option to delegate.
I couldn’t read the paper as it is behind a paywall. Yet, I suppose voters could only choose one delegate again.
The result could have been quite different if a voter had many delegates and had a way of knowing why they think as they do. For example, a user could have among her delegates friends she trusts, Nobel Prize winners and even long public lists of delegates. If her list of delegates can include public lists of delegates, her last delegation could be a public list of all MIT faculty.
For example, among the voting mechanisms I described, we had priority lists and consensus lists. In the latter, the voter would only delegate if all her delegates agreed. Otherwise, when they disagreed, she would receive an email, read the reasons why their delegates disagree and vote directly. This is an example of a system that would help voters make up their minds and access opposing views.
To sum up, I’d like to see experiments and papers where voters have more than one delegate — even many delegates.