Following discussion and ratification by a Snapshot vote, the following procedures are being trialed and in effect until May 30th, 2025.
Important Note: After conversations with the Arbitrum Foundation and a deeper review of the Arbitrum Constitution, the Election Standards during this trial period will apply only to Snapshot Elections. Procedures for the Security Council Elections will not be changed in any way. Clarifying language has been added to the procedures below. Please find additional rationale and explanation here.
Voting Schedule
To improve predictability in the Arbitrum DAO’s operations, delegates agree to abide by the following vote scheduling guidelines.
Minimum Discussion Period of One Week
In accordance with the Arbitrum Constitution, delegates should follow the recommendation that proposals be open to discussion on the forums for at least one week before being put to a vote. This is to allow delegates ample time to review and provide feedback.
Start all votes on Thursdays
By starting both Snapshot and Tally votes on Thursday, on top of increasing predictability for delegates, the DAO would also prevent the scenario where votes begin/end on weekends.
Create Onchain AIPs on Tally on Mondays
In order for a Tally vote to start on Thursday, it must be posted on Monday given the 3-day delay from when a proposal is posted until voting begins.
Schedule Temperature Checks on Snapshot from Monday through Wednesday
Each batch of proposals ready to move to a Snapshot vote can be scheduled beforehand beginning on Monday and through Wednesday. Delegates are encouraged to post/schedule votes to begin before Thursday at 12 pm UTC. This can be achieved by setting the voting period to start in the future. While not a hard deadline, this will help ensure any votes start on Thursday for a majority of delegates worldwide.
DAO Holiday Break: December 20th, 2024 - January 6th, 2025
The DAO agrees to a holiday break, where no new votes will be created and/or voted on from December 20 - January 6th. This is to ensure delegates have a break and can return refreshed for the new year. During this time it is advised that no new proposals are posted to the forums, and only emergency proposals are put up to a vote.
Proposal authors should be cognizant of timelines and aim to have all voting wrapped up by Thursday, December 19th if possible. To ensure this, temperature checks should start no later than Thursday, December 12th and onchain votes start no later than December 5th.
Emergency Proposals
In the event of an emergency proposal that is time-sensitive in nature, any guidelines can be waived for the proposal to be put up to a vote immediately. This would likely apply to only Constitutional AIPs that relate to security or treasury-related exploit matters that are potentially not in the scope of the Security Council.
Election Standards
Responsible Voting Policy
Responsible voting is an effort to strike a balance between preventing delegates from unfavorably electing themselves into a position of power and compensation while allowing them to still effectively represent their communities and tokenholders. In a normal election with multiple seats, the policy is simple: candidates may vote for themselves as long as they also cast votes to fill all the remaining positions. Since Arbitrum DAO operates with token voting, the following guidelines have been set in place to address edge scenarios:
- Candidates are allowed to abstain or vote in a neutral manner to effectively abstain, ie., voting or splitting their vote equally across all candidates.
- If a candidate self-votes, they should to the best of their ability make the weights as equal as possible spread among the number of candidates necessary to every seat.
- A buffer of 0.1% is acceptable to account for rounding in the Snapshot UI.
- A candidate’s self-vote percentage should always be less than or equal to 100/n, where n = number of seats.
- Unacceptable Example: In an election with 7 seats, a candidate’s self-vote exceeds 14.286%.
- A candidate’s self-vote weight should not be larger than any of the weights for other candidates. Both of the following examples would be considered violations:
- Unacceptable Example: In an election with 7 seats, the candidate votes 94% for themselves and 1% for 6 other candidates.
- Unacceptable Example: In an election with 7 seats and a total of 15 candidates, a delegate votes 10% for themselves and 6.43% for all other candidates.
- Candidates may vote for less or more candidates than seats available as long as they adhere to the above restrictions. This allows delegates to retain the power to express a certain level of preference, but does increase the risk for collusion. Any suspected instances of collusion will be investigated by the Arbitrum Foundation and will be grounds for disqualification.
- Acceptable Example: In a 7-seat election, a candidate self-votes for themself with 14.286% and 85.714% for another candidate.
- Acceptable Example: In a 7-seat election, a candidate splits their vote equally across 10 candidates, each getting 10%.
Delegates not participating in the election are free to vote however they wish, but if a conflict of interest exists, it should be disclosed on the forums before voting as outlined in the Delegate Code of Conduct.
During this trial period, the Responsible Voting Policy will only apply to elections held on Snapshot.
Shielded Elections with Weighted Voting
The Arbitrum DAO has decided that the default Snapshot election type will be weighted voting as opposed to approval or ranked choice voting.
Additionally, the Arbitrum DAO has decided to trail shielded voting as the default option for elections held on Snapshot. Shielded voting encrypts votes during the voting period and decrypts them only after the vote closes. Put more simply, during the voting process, a voter’s position is private, and after the vote, positions are made public. Delegates can see who voted, but not their choice or the total VP per option. Shielded voting aims to mitigate bandwagon effects, minority voter apathy, and last-minute strategic voting.
Proposal authors still retain the optionality to justify why an election should not be shielded or weighted voting. Elections that lack justification but are posted as non-shielded or non-weighted voting should be considered void and either restarted immediately or pushed to the following Thursday.
Since shielded voting keeps a voter’s position private, monitoring for breaches of the Responsible Voting Policy will be conducted post election. This responsibility will fall primarily on the proposal author or individual/entity managing the election process, but anyone can bring a suspected violation forward.
Confirmed violations of the Responsible Voting Policy by a delegate participating in an election will result in immediate disqualification from the application process along with the delegate’s votes being retroactively removed from the election results. In the event of a disqualification, the proposal author or stakeholder managing the election should present the DAO with the updated election results. It is the voter’s responsibility to support an ethical candidate that abides by Arbitium DAO’s standards.
Suspected collusion will be investigated by the Arbitrum Foundation and also be grounds for disqualification from an elected position and/or the DIP. Contributors that suspect collusion should message the Arbitrum Foundation team privately to notify them of the situation.
Minimum Application Period
In order to draw a sufficient number of high quality applicants, application periods should be a minimum of 14 days.
Where n = number of seats; proposal authors should seek to have at least n+3 applicants before starting the election. Since this may not always be possible, it is simply a recommendation and not a requirement.
Delegating to the Arbitrum Exclude Address
ARB tokens allocated to DAO initiatives are not to be used in governance. To keep circulating voting supply from increasing, whenever possible, multi-sigs holding program funds should delegate to the Arbitrum Exclude Address. This is to prevent tokens from being included in quorum calculations. Individuals that do not want to participate in governance can also delegate their ARB to the Exclude Address. Instructions for how to do so have been outlined on this forum post.