Voting & quorum

How voting power is held and delegated is covered under the ARM token. This page covers how votes are counted once a proposal is live.

Casting a vote

A voter's weight is their delegated ARM at the proposal's snapshot block. Votes are For, Against, or Abstain, and can be changed at any time while voting is open. But a vote, once cast, cannot be withdrawn — changing it only moves your weight between the three buckets; your weight keeps counting toward quorum either way. That prevents a voter from pushing turnout over the quorum line and then pulling it back under.

Quorum

Quorum is the minimum participation a proposal needs. It is the greater of two things:

• a percentage of circulating voting power — 20% for Standard proposals, 30% for Extended; and
• an absolute floor of 200,000 ARM.

The floor matters because the percentage alone could be tiny early on, when little ARM is circulating and delegated. Requiring at least 200,000 ARM of participation stops proposals from passing on near-zero turnout regardless of how much ARM is active at the time. Participation counts all votes — For, Against, and Abstain alike.

The circulating denominator

The percentage is measured against circulating voting power, not the raw total supply. From the total, the protocol subtracts:

• the treasury (protocol-owned ARM never votes), and
• excluded addresses — the crowdfund, revenue-lock, and reserve-distributor contracts, whose ARM is allocated or locked but not yet in holders' hands.

This is snapshotted when the proposal is created, so the target can't shift mid-vote, and it keeps non-voteable ARM from inflating the bar that real participants have to clear. A proposal succeeds when quorum is met and a majority votes For; otherwise it is defeated.