Snapshot Voting Privacy Setting

Forum post: https://gov.0x.org/t/temperature-checks-snapshot-voting-privacy-setting/3439

Goal of the vote

This poll is to utilize Snapshot's "Voter Privacy" setting for use in future off-chain snapshot votes. (Disclaimer: voter privacy is turned on for this Snapshot temporarily as a POC and will be reverted if this vote does not pass)

Context

Snapshot proposals are currently used to gauge community sentiment on serious topics under consideration for onchain governance votes that impact 0x protocol.

Currently, snapshot votes use the default voting privacy setting which shows the result of an ongoing poll in real time. As of October 2022, Snapshot integrated with ShutterDAO to enable an opt-in voting privacy setting which will encrypt votes while the poll is live and only review the result when the voting period is over.

Why Opt-in to Voting Privacy?

While 1 token 1 vote has made participating in governance easier, there are some major shortcomings to it as talked about by prominent people within the blockchain space Vitalik (1, 2, 3). Highlighting two of the problems here are (1) plutarchy, or the ability for wealth/capital to heavily influence vote results, (2) bribery & collusion, or the ability for highly coordinated individuals/groups to heavily influence vote results. As a consequence of suboptimal governance, we also see (3) voter apathy or low participation.

While Opting into voting privacy does not solve all of these problems completely, I think that it would be a meaningful experiment and be a step in the right direction. In terms of how hiding the current result of a vote while it is still live could address each of those three problems above specifically

1. Plutarchy - increases the cost for an attacker to influence the result since it’s not clear how many votes they’d need to get their preferred outcome.
2. Bribery & Collusion - reduce strategic voting for non-basic voting systems (i.e. rank-based where people might not vote truthfully if it increases the change of their preferred option winning)
3. Voter Apathy - reduce the feeling that a vote doesn’t matter since it’s unclear what the current tally is

Do you support turning on Voter Privacy for future Snapshot votes?