Delegating Voting Power

Multirole Delegation​

In OpenGov, an alternate strategy was required to replace the Council in its previous duties as a body delegated by voters to compensate for the fact that many choose to not take part in day-to-day of governance. OpenGov builds on the Vote Delegation feature from v1 where a voter can choose to delegate their voting power to another voter in the system. It does so by improving a feature known as Multirole Delegation, where voters can specify a different delegate for every class of referendum in the system. Delegation can be done per track, and accounts can choose to select different delegates (or no delegation) for each track.

For example, a voter could delegate one entity for managing a less potent referenda class, choose a different delegate for a different class with more powerful consequences and still retain full voting power over any remaining classes.

Occasional delegation and undelegation calls are fee-free: creating an incentive for token holders to use this feature and ensure that wallets can do it “by default” without any cost to end-users. It is worth noting that a user delegating their voting power does not imply that the delegate will have control over the funds of the delegating account: they can vote with a user's voting power: but they won't be able to transfer your balance, nominate a different set of validators or execute any call other than voting on the defined call/s by the user.

With the new delegation features, the goal is to ensure the required turnouts for proposals to be enacted are reached while maintaining the anonymity of voters and keeping the overall design censorship-free.

For a step-by-step outline of how to delegate voting power in OpenGov, check out the Delegating Voting Power on Polkassembly section