Participation rates in many on-chain voting systems are low.

TBD: get some actual data on this

Is this a problem?

Low participation rates are a problem if:

• members would like to vote, but the (technological, financial, cerebral) friction is too high
• in cases where the decision is not representative of the opinion of all members of the DAO - and specifically so in case of a malicious proposal or an attack.
• In cases where participation in the decision process is part of the ideology of "values" of the DAO
• there can also be a problem in the case where the Voting Power is not distributed well, for example if most of the voting pwoer is in the hands of a few whales, and smaller fish do not vote

Reasons

• High Gas costs - this is solved by snapshot
• Qualitatively, we know most people view the on-chain parts of decision-making as a chore.

Solutions

• "Holographic Consensus" promises a high correlation with "the will of the majority" also with a low voter turnout, by allowing the information from a type of prediction market to influence the decision process
• Polling (whether informally or not) before actual on-chain voting makes it unnecessary to re-count the votes on chain - in this case, a low turnout is actually a sign of efficiency of the system
• Delegation of voting power (as Compound does) is another solution
• Continuous Voting (as in Maker or Curve Gauge, or as in LivePeer staking) is a partial solution for participation
• Incentivization as in the case of "vote farming" (rewarding active users with tokens), "reputation flow" systems (in which active users gain more voting power) may help with participation rates
• Ideas like the "council" proposed for Yearn can reduce the required number of transactions for average users significantly.