Thank you for making this distinction and waiting until after the election to post 
I’m very grateful for this and I think it speaks to high degree of integrity found within the AF.
To add some more context to the discussion:
- I did not ask for these votes
- I (and everyone else) had no way of verifying the votes for OAT were even cast for me, because the election was shielded (private) on snapshot.
- I voluntarily disclosed that Hitmonlee told me the votes were cast for me. Actually, I think my choice of transparency greatly negatively effected my candidacy. But I’m content with the results anyway.
In regards to actually addressing this, I have posted in the delegate channel and on twitter publicly (the following is my message):
Other mitigation strategies that have been proposed (by me):
- increase DAO voting resilience by increasing quorum requirements, or remove abstain from quorum Basically, play with this more and update it more often as the DAO evolves BEFORE this becomes an issue, not after.
- Support major positive contributors to the DAO so they dont feel like vote buying is the only way to get their work through
- provide other yield to ARB token holders so they arent 100% incentivized to use vote buying.
We can address these concerns and protect the DAO long term without banning lobbyfi or other similar mechanisms. Goodharts Law… I actually don’t think you could ban vote buying so long as ARB is a tradable, transferable token with economic value, and by trying to ban it we will just drive these actions underground into the dark forest. Dark Pools, private zk payments, etc.. Vitalik wrote about futarchy more than 10 years ago and vote buying has been something considered by society for at least 500 years.
This is the reality of all DAOs from now on, so lets seriously address the root cause of the issues. To those reading this, If you want to address the underlying issues and DAO resilience, please consider my above proposals.