For last year’s vote on SIP-012, https://sip012.xyz/ displayed a live tabulation of ‘IN SUPPORT’ vs. ‘AGAINST’ votes as they were coming in:
For this year’s vote on SIP-015, I propose that we remove the vote counter and instead, just show progress toward the Stacked STX threshold (80 million STX). The idea here is to minimize the influence that a live count might have on voters, i.e. if a voter sees that a large number of STX have already been committed in support of 2.1, they might be discouraged from participating in the vote at all because they’ll feel like their vote doesn’t really count.
A neutral Stacked STX progress bar might even encourage more voters; imagine a situation in which the threshold has not yet been met and there are only 3 days left to vote. We would feel pressure to quickly turn out more voters in order to complete the vote.
I think the idea @jennymith had is that instead of showing the vote totals numerically, there is a percentage graph of “yes” and possibly “no” as a progress-bar kind of thing.
it would likely make the ideas below a little easier to resolve as well:
Oh actually, just a progress bar toward the NUMBER of Stacked STX used to vote. I would eliminate any counts/progress indicators of “yes” and “no” votes completely because that could also influence people’s votes.
Everything stated here makes sense! Thanks @jennymith for bringing it up and @jwiley I updated the GitHub issue with some thoughts on how I would tabulate / cache the data.
The voting process was also simplified by this proposal, which was just merged in to the main text of SIP-015.
To summarize:
the Stacked votes through method 1 and 2 are counted based on the amount stacked either solo or in a pool. The minimum participation required is 80M STX, and the votes must be 80% yes.
the liquid STX votes are counted based on a snapshot of the balance but capped at the reward cycle’s minimum threshold (140,000 STX). No minimum is required but the votes must be 66% yes.
This seems already decided and tbh I also don’t have strong feeling on this particular issue either way.
That said, I wanted to point out for the record that removing the vote count is really just obscuring the vote count from people unable (technically) or unwilling to calculate the current vote tally on their own. In practice, “technical people” really means “insiders” who were involved in the creation of the process because others will have a steep learning curve to replicate it on their own.
I’m not sure that makes the process “fairer” - in fact it seems like it makes less fair because everyone doesn’t have equally easy access to the same information. Seems like the default should be to expose more info to a wider audience than to obscure it.
I would also challenge the assumption that “minimizing the effect of the live vote count on voters” results in people feeling like their vote doesn’t count. While this might be the case in a massively one-sided vote, in the event of a close vote, it could have the opposite effect causing one side that sees they are close to losing to work harder to get out the vote.
