Governance Split Votes

In the Cosmos Hub governance system, each address can only cast a vote for one option (Yes/No/Abstain/NoWithVeto) which uses their full voting power behind that choice.

This proposal proposes an upgrade to the Cosmos Hub governance module that would allow a staker to optionally split their votes into several voting options. For example, a single address could use 70% of its voting power to vote Yes and 30% of its voting power to vote No. Clients may opt into supporting this feature, as the existing UX of voting for a single option is preserved.

This is beneficial because oftentimes the entity owning that address might not be a single individual. For example, a company or organization that owns an address might have different stakeholders who want to vote differently, and so it makes sense to allow them to split their voting power.

Another example use case is exchanges and custodians. Many custodians and exchanges custody multiple customers’ ATOMs in the same address and use this address to stake on behalf of them. However, because of this, it makes it infeasible to do 'passthrough voting' and give their customers voting rights over their tokens, if different customers have different voting preferences. With this new proposal, custodians can use split votes to accurately reflect the preferences of their customers in on-chain governance.

The technical architecture for this feature can be seen in ADR 037 to the Cosmos SDK: https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk/blob/master/docs/architecture/adr-037-gov-split-vote.md

Acceptance of this governance proposal is signalling approval to adopt this feature in a future upgrade of the Cosmos Hub.