These comments and thoughts reflect my personal opinions on this proposal. Whilst I am a member of the Arbitrum Representative Council (ARC), they do not necessarily represent the overall views of the council.
As others have indicated I believe a preventing delegate self voting is philosophically and technically flawed.
Philosophical
Delegates are trusted to actively engage in voting in their communities and they should be empowered to support candidates who can effectively advocate for their delegate base. In many instances this may be the delegate themselves, or a member of their broader community. If self voting is prohibited, it would likely lead to large delegates abstaining from voting in many instances. This would hinder delegate’s ability to truly represent their delegate base’s interests and disconnect many token holders from Arbitrum’s governance process.
Technical
If self vote rules were implemented all elections would have to be manually audited to identify delegates and individuals who are self voting. This creates an operational overhead, and means final results produced through governance may not be adhered to and may require manually adjusted to address instances where delegates intentionally or mistakenly self voted. Even with active identification of delegates self voting, it may be infeasible to accurately identify all instances of self voting in a governance process. Moreover, the definition of “self voting” is still somewhat subjective, and fringe cases may need to be clarified by an adjudicator.
Rules around self voting make us less than decentralized and are less than ideal. Together I feel that this undermines the open, transparent and trustless approach to decision making DAO governance should provide.
Going forward…
I would be in support of non-binding (and non monitored) “delegate voting best practices” in a format similar to that suggested by GFX Labs:
We may also want to define further recommendations for delegate best practise for other voting mechanisms. For example the split vote mechanism used in the recent Procurement Committee election could have had delegates apply the following guidance:
Delegate can allocate no more than 50% of their vote to one of their own party.
It may be beneficial to tie this work in with @Bob-Rossi’s proposal on Standardised Guidelines for non security Council election.
These could be put forward to the DAO via snapshot votes for token holders to weigh in on with their perspective. I’ve provided my recommendations for non security Council election best practice adjustment here. Relating specifically to self voting, I’d recommend a rank order snapshot with the following options:
- Delegates can’t self vote
- Delegates can self vote, and are encouraged to vote aligned with best practice guidelines
- Delegates can self vote and should not be encouraged to vote aligned best practise guidelines
These options might be a little wordy, but I’m hopefully targeted use of snapshot can help the DAO come to a clear decision on how to conduct elections going forward.