I've got to say that's a very interesting and thoughtful comment, @king.bee. Bear in mind that people can vote for candidates and proxies based on more than just a singular issue. A lot of people, myself included, didn't want to see either a chain split or centralization of the chain.

With that in mind, I can see why some folks may have spread their votes out equally among both sides. "It's a vote that says, come on guys stop being idiots, work it out!" It's a vote that's equivalent to no vote at all. But to address your comment, which I find very interesting and even struggle with myself.

I choose not to vote for president. I choose this path because, in virtually all the cases that I am aware of, Presidents order the killing, death, or murder of people, and there are always innocent people who get swept up in the collateral damage.

Now, if I choose not to vote for President (because presidents kill people) and a Hitler comes to power, does my non-vote make me responsible for all the murders that Hitler commits?

Or inversely to your comparison, if you vote for a U.S. President and they order troops overseas to commit war (large scale killing,) does that make you responsible for collateral murder because innocent bystanders were killed, and it was tracked back to your ballot?

In this instance, the 300 didn't even know they were voting against a hard fork. You see, the criteria indicates they had to unvote the offending witnesses or proxies before the HIVE announcement. You might conclude they were voting for centralization, but they could have been AFK from the chain. They could have been voting for gridlock in hopes that cooler heads would prevail.

And of course, most distastefully, they could have been voting for centralization, but these folks did not have the verboten stake. They were regular stakeholders who probably purchased their holdings. If we don't respect their opinions, it will get around that dPoS on the new chain is a lie, and that'll mean that potential stakeholders will feel less secure in buying the stake. Of course, all of this happens over time, but it will eventually have a cascading effect that could lead to a colossal fail.

I say if legit stakeholders want to vote poorly or wisely, we should allow them to do just that. It's how voting works in the real world, we don't take people out in the streets and shoot'em in the head for voting for red or blue when they "should have" voted otherwise.

A lot of this problem is baked into the cake that is the blockchain. To be quite frank, we suffer from too much transparency. In the real world, wallets are not transparent, voting is a private affair, and bathrooms have doors. In blockchain land, everything is a bit topsy-turvy, and this creates problems that wouldn't otherwise be there.