# Private Voting

Votes are the same as on the Cosmos Hub: Yes, No, NoWithVeto, and Abstain. NoWithVeto is the same as No but also votes that the proposer should lose their deposit. The intended cultural norm is that No should be used to indicate disagreement with good-faith proposals and NoWithVeto should be used to deter spam proposals.

• this isn’t exactly the same as on the hub, where there’s a distinct veto mechanic; is that mechanic good to copy?

By default, stakeholders’ votes are delegated to the validator their stake is bonded to. Validators’ votes are public, signed by the validator’s key, and act as a default vote for their entire delegation pool.

Stakeholders vote by proving ownership of some amount of bonded stake (their voting power) prior to the beginning of the voting period.

To do this, they create a transaction with a VoteDescription. This description reveals the validator and one of the four votes above, consumes PENb(v) from the transaction’s balance, produces a new note with PENb, and includes , an encryption of the voting power to the validators’ decryption key.

Descriptions that spend notes contain a proof-of-inclusion for the note they spend. This establishes that a commitment to the spent note was previously included in the note commitment tree, an incremental Merkle tree whose current root (”anchor”) is included in each block. Normally, these proofs are created and validated with respect to a recent anchor. However, transactions containing VoteDescriptions are always validated with respect to the anchor in the last block before the voting period begins. This prevents double-voting, by ensuring that only notes created before voting began can be used to vote.

## TODO

• vote acceptance thresholds / veto behavior
• encrypt voting power for each vote choice so that the vote does not reveal it