Since HF19, your votes now use up to four times your voting power than you used to. As you know, this will drain your voting power quickly. This tutorial is a quick tip on how to vote without using the full voting power.

Setup

Python 3.5 or greater must be installed and ready for use.

Install Python on Windows

The easiest way to do this is to install Anaconda. Create an environment for Python 3.5. Once that is setup click the green triangle to open the terminal under that environment.

Install Python on Mac

I use Homebrew to install python using brew install python3. Python can also be downloaded from the official website and installed the same way as Windows.

Setup steempy

If you see an error while running these command make sure that Python is successfully installed and usable.

• Open the command line and run these commands:
  • pip install steem - This installs the steem Python library.
    • On Windows, assuming you are using Anaconda, navigate to your Anaconda installation directory (e.g. C:\Users\<Your Username>\Anaconda3). Then go to envs\Python35\Lib\site-packages\Crypto\Random\OSRNG. Open nt.py with your favorite text editor and replace import winrandom with from Crypto.Random.OSRNG import winrandom. This must be done after steem is installed in order for steempy to work correctly.
  • steempy importaccount <your account> - Replace <your account> with your account without the @. For example I would use samrg472.

Using steempy to vote

This is the easiest part since everything is now setup! All we have to do is enter a single command in your terminal.

• First, make sure your terminal is open.
• Run steempy upvote --account <your account> --weight 75 <link to article>

Replace <your account> with the account you used earlier. Replace weight to the desired weight. In the example, your vote will use 75% of your weight. This value ranges from 0.1 to 100.0.

That's all, you successfully upvoted your desired post while sparing your voting power for other posts!

Summary

Setting up Python and steempy is the most difficult part of the process. Once you're past those hurdles upvoting is really simple.

As a bonus, play around with steempy to see what other actions you can perform. :)

---

I hope you enjoyed reading this article and learned something from it. Feel free to leave suggestions or ask questions down below.