Does Your Vote Count for Splinterlands Proposals?

Before I go into the main topic of this post, I'd like to express my... disappointment.

From all the supposedly active players on Splinterlands, only 621 and 479, respectively, bothered to vote on two of the most important recent proposals of Splinterlands, one for SPS.DAO (actually more) and one for the DHF on Hive?

Here are the proofs (at the time of writing):

I know some people are used not to vote on governance proposals, but let's say tomorrow someone puts out a proposal that all rewards be removed. I'm curious how many players would vote then, either way. The same holds true for Hive users.

Are there too many proposals, at least where the SPS.DAO is concerned? It depends. There shouldn't be a proposal to ask us what color should they make the background of the cards (it's not even SPS DAO's business, I just gave a silly example), and we haven't seen such proposals, but otherwise this is Web 3, and a higher degree of involvement is requirement. I'm pretty sure enough people are not very happy with the quality of work our political representatives in real world are doing, so there's that alternative to look for, if we don't like Web 3 and decentralization.

Hive Governance and Proxies

It seems I need to explain this every time there is a governance vote gathers some interest on Hive.

People can set a proxy account on Hive that will make all your governance votes for you on Hive. The proxy account doesn't manage voting separately for every account that sets them as proxies, that would be a ton of work. What happens is your HIVE Power votes the same way the proxy account votes on governance. If you have a proxy account set and you vote on governance (a proposal or witness vote), your vote will be ignored. What has to happen is the proxy account needs to vote. If it doesn't or it votes another way, there's nothing you can do except:

remove the proxy account, and vote yourself
change the proxy account
convince the proxy account to vote the way you want to

How to check if you have a proxy account set? From here, for example.

If it says something like that at the top, you have a proxy account set:

If you want to remove a proxy you can do it from your profile in PeakD (note Remove proxy @gadrian-sp menu option):

I also like the way PeakD handles setting proxies. It only shows the option to "set as proxy" an account that already had other accounts which had set them as proxy before (there are other options to set an account as proxy if no one had set it before). But on PeakD, you simply navigate to the wallet page of the account you want to set as proxy, and you will see the option to set it as proxy on the Interactions menu, if it is available.

You can test it with my account @gadrian-sp, which already has accounts setting it as proxy, and will have that option in the menu.

If you don't like the PeakD approach, you can do it from Keychain, without restrictions.

You May Not Know...

If I remember correctly, Keychain has a policy of not voting on any proposal (including its own). I'm not sure if it has the same policy about witnesses.

That means that if you have @Keychain set as your proxy account (this may have been by default if they created your account), you won't vote on governance on Hive, EVER, regardless if you try to vote or not with your account.

If you want your vote to matter for governance on Hive, you need to change your proxy or remove it and continue voting yourself.

After checking a few of the accounts that have set a proxy and vote on the Splinterlands DHF proposal, @cryp71x is in this situation and maybe others (I don't have the patience to check them all - this is better to do with a script).