# Why Public Voting makes sense for NDC This is my personal opinion, not the position of the #GWG. I've seen lot of combative comments about the #NDC v1 works, and want to share my thoughts that hopefully will provide more context and understanding to the community. ## Context Past months were full of back and forth about fair voting: - one #human one #vote, - identity sell prevention (real threat in many identity systems), that essentially breaks the one human one vote rule, - vote selling, - detecting how the system can be gamed, and how we can prevent that. Observation: **NEAR account != human**. Note: that's why we built the #SBT system. On the prevention side: - establishing Fair Voting Policy, - additional checks and rules to prevent bad actors, - introducing an Election Integrity Commission which will be responsible for acting on misconduct. Every prevention mechanism can introduce potential censorship. There is always a group of users who are more loud, or more empowered to make decisions, and a group of users who will be always questioning everything. Adding more "checks" will make the system more controversial and more complex. Having not enough checks, will make the system more vulnerable for voting manipulation. Not having enough community support will make the system questionable for censorship. This is not a solvable problem, there are always trade offs. ## Trade Offs The GWG trade offs were dictated by the Fair Voting Policy. At the end of the day we wanted fair voting, rather than "manipulated" voting. The preference goes towards verified humans by their humanity check AND ecosystem check (contributions, roles ...). The Whistleblower program was introduced to encourage people who care about fair voting and don't want to see the system manipulated. The trade off is to optimize for having less scam votes rather than more overall votes. At the end of the day, the "chain" is as strong as its ecosystem, which is built by the communities. If part of the ecosystem will try to game it, eventually this will break the communities and destroy the ecosystem. ## Private Voting Initially, when designing the voting system we knew that eventually we will need to go to strong privacy. This is what everyone expects. However, technically we were not there yet (ZK primitives only started to enter NEAR in Q2 2023). We would need to delay the NDC vision by many months, rather than give it a try and iterate. ## Pivotal Seeing a lot of people trying to question the whole mechanism and at the same time praise themselves for NDC Governance is interesting. The goal of NDC is to be a public collective. All these events lead me to the conclusion: in the young, small and growing ecosystem, the **votes should be public**! This will: empower the community to validate the voting process; see how the clusters and politics are being built; provide more insights into how the congress is being shaped; gain more trust in the governance. NDC is here to break the ice, and the voting will be a show off. All of it is recorded on chain. This is the beauty of the open, public voting system: it's for the public and available for anyone for analysis. Of course, there are people who are criticizing the approach and respond “we could do it better”, this is not how the voting should work etc... There is a lot to improve, but we need to start somewhere, deliver and iterate. Public voting will provide a lot of insights and hopefully undercover political games. ## Final Notes There were proposals to cluster the voting body by communities, and assure congress decentralization by allowing max X candidates from the same cluster. The idea (IMO very good) failed (some #OG mess, #KYC requirements etc…). If the community will see that politics won the NDC, the community should go against, and dismantle the NDC v1 Gov. The Community is empowered to do that! There is a lot we can learn from the NDC elections already. #Governance v1 is just a start, and we should not stop developing the gov framework. The Congress v1 term is short to assure that we iterate fast and move forward. I hope this idea will stick in our mind and we will all agree to iterate and move forward without going backwards too much. One thing is sure: building a decentralized governance may sound simple, but it’s a very complex task with tons of nuances.