We study elections where voters are faced with the challenge of expressing preferences over an extreme number of issues under consideration. This is largely motivated by emerging blockchain governance systems, which include voters with different weights and a massive number of community generated proposals. In such scenarios, it is natural to expect that voters will have incomplete preferences, as they may only be able to evaluate or be confident about a very small proportion of the alternatives. As a result, the election outcome may be significantly affected, leading to suboptimal decisions. Our central inquiry revolves around whether delegation of ballots to proxies possessing greater expertise or a more comprehensive understanding of the voters' preferences can lead to outcomes with higher legitimacy and enhanced voters' satisfaction in elections where voters submit incomplete preferences. To explore its aspects, we introduce the following model: potential proxies advertise their ballots over multiple issues, and each voter either delegates to a seemingly attractive proxy or casts a ballot directly. We identify necessary and sufficient conditions that could lead to a socially better outcome by leveraging the participation of proxies. We accompany our theoretical findings with experiments on instances derived from real datasets. Overall, our results enhance the understanding of the power of delegation towards improving election outcomes.

翻译：我们研究选民在面对海量议题时表达偏好的选举问题。该研究主要源于新兴的区块链治理系统——这类系统中不同权重的选民需要处理社区生成的大量议案。在此类场景中，选民很可能仅能评估或确信极少数备选方案，从而形成不完全偏好。这种偏好缺失可能显著影响选举结果，导致次优决策。核心研究问题在于：当选民提交不完全偏好时，将选票委托给更具专业知识或更全面理解选民偏好的代理人，是否能产生更高合法性的结果并提升选民满意度？为探究该问题，我们提出以下模型：潜在代理人公开其对多个议题的投票意向，每位选民可选择委托给看似有吸引力的代理人，或直接提交选票。我们识别出借助代理人参与可达成更优社会结果的充分必要条件，并通过基于真实数据集的实例实验验证理论发现。总体而言，本研究深化了对委托投票在改善选举结果方面作用机制的理解。