Democracy Features

Voting Types

Binary: a traditional yes-or-no vote • Multi-Option: where individuals can select multiple choices

Commit-Reveal: a scheme to commit to a specific vote by posting the hash of the vote.

At the resolution of the vote the TallyType, changes the method by which votes are weighed. They are enumerated below:

Tally Types

Coin-Weight: where votes that an individual account casts are weighed on a per coin–one coin is equivalent to one vote

Lock-time weight: where an account votes with a specific lock duration, with longer times corresponding to more voting power. For example, a vote may be locked for a one or two week period, with the latter time corresponding to a two-times voting power increase. Lock-time-weighting allows individual accounts with a smaller token balance to exercise more power in the governance process.

One-person-one-vote: where one account or identity can cast one vote. On Edgeware, one-person-one-vote may refer to a specific set of verified identities, such as verified Github accounts. 13 Initially, all referendum on Edgeware will be cast with both coin-weighting and lock-time-weighting. An important note, for coin-Weighted voting, a user cannot do a ”partial funds vote”–users can only vote and lock up all the funds for a given account for the lock period, or not vote at all.

Implementation Delay

Following the resolution of a vote, there is a delay before implementing any change–initially set to two weeks.

{% hint style="info" %} Parameter Note: The implementation delay for concluded referenda is set to 2 weeks. {% endhint %}

Delegated Voting

Additionally, the democracy module allows for delegated voting, the middle point between direct and representative democracy. At any point before a vote ends, an account can cast a vote different than how the account to whom the account may have delegated has done, essentially, any account can overrule the decision their delegate makes. Voluntary delegation has the potential to increase political participation, reduce strategic incentives within the election process, and ameliorate the political principal-agent problem.

Delegation can be recursive, a delegate can re-delegate to another, using their own voting power and also the delegated voting power of others. Edgeware mitigates an attack where a malicious individual may manipulate the depth of a delegation tree to an extreme depth. Instead of forcing all nodes tallying votes to traverse a deep tree of delegates, Edgeware limits the delegation to five. Cyclic delegation additionally prevented. Democracy will be extended by adding support for a different VotingType such as enabling rank-choice and anonymous voting, where accounts are directly linked to their cast ballot. Or by adding different TallyingTypes such as quadratic voting.

{% hint style="info" %} Delegation is limited to 5 levels deep. No vote can be delegated more than 5 times. {% endhint %}