Minority Protections

Given the relatively low voter turnouts on governance proposals, we should consider implementing additional “minority” voter protections to prevent a small group of voters from completely capturing the IC’s governance. One potential idea would be to require more than a simple majority if less than a certain percentage of the total voting power has voted on a particular proposal. For example, we could say that if less than 50% of the total voting power votes, a proposal needs 60% of the votes cast to be approved. Or, we could even create a sliding scale so that the lower the voting participation rate is for any given proposal, the higher the percentage of votes cast a proposal needs to actually be approved.

The extremely tight vote for the “Compounding Maturity Proposal” made me think of this (even though I voted yes on it and continue to believe it is a good idea). But the application of the idea extends far beyond just that one specific proposal.

Thoughts?

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I think the days of a proposal passing with only 3% of votes cast to approve are behind us. We have a significant percentage of votes being cast on governance proposals and the proposal weights will continue to make that a priority for a large fraction of the voting body. I’m fine with the rules of simple majority as they stand today. The wait for quiet mechanism also has an important utility to ensure that nobody can wait until the end and cast a surprise vote to flip the outcome.

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@wpb - roughly 24% of the total voting power voted on the “Compounding Maturity Proposal.” Because of that, it passed even though only roughly 12.3% of the total voting power voted in favor of it, and roughly 11.74% of the total voting power actively voted against it. My question is: are we OK with ~12.3% of the total voting power deciding what our tokenomics looks like? My next question is: are we OK with that when ~11.74% of the total voting power actively votes against it?

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For me personally, I am comfortable with the mechanics of the Simple Majority decision making process.

Approx 24% of total voting power actively voted and decided that proposal. It could have passed or rejected by a single vote difference and that should be enough when we have that much voter turnout. I think this is consistent with typical majority voting practices.

I would also argue that up to 25% of voting power actively decided to abstain. That’s the amount of voting power that has been getting triggered when neuron 27 & 28 vote. They clearly decided to abstain. Hence, in reality 24 - 49% of total voting power actually participated in voting on that proposal.

Just found out about this thread. I agree with @BenTaylor but for a different reason than only % of voting.
If you have ever ran an organization (company), let’s say with 50+ people, you are certainly aware that if you make a change where 50% of people will be happy and the other 50% will be pissed, your company will fail. You need a vast majority (75%) on your side for 2 main reasons:
1- you will have 75% of people to help to convince the minority 25% to support the change.
2- If it is 51-49, you better do nothing, no change at all, because you will divide your organization and each camp will hold their stance firm.

So before you intend to make the change, 100% of people were happy
You vote 51-49% for a change where the 49% are really unhappy.
You endup with half of your organization fighting the other half instead of having everyone working together towards the same goal.
I say 75% - 25% because my experience teached me 100% is not possible.

I will not go back to proposal 48623 but I can say that 100% of voters were not qualified to vote on such a topic as Deloite or KPMG, or any high quality tax firm did not vote. Just not our expertise. A serious professional expertise should have been provided before the vote. That proposal have showed me that DAO have his limit and his big, huge, flaws.

Not all vote subject have the same weight and the same impact. Proposal 48623 had a huge impact and this is why it was and still is so controversial.

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