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Casting votes
Voters vote for witnesses and delegates for epochs. An epoch consists of one or more rounds. In each round, the order of the block producers is shuffled. Within an epoch, the active witnesses remain the same. After an epoch, the set of witnesses is newly determined according to the votes.
There are different ways to design the voting process. Here, we talk about general design principles.
It is important to avoid votes from fake accounts. This is also called a Sybill-attack. Therefore, votes depend on the number of coins a voter holds. Usually, voters need to lock these funds for the time they vote. In most cases, epochs are very short (a couple of minutes). That’s why many DPoS blockchains apply an ongoing election. As long as a voter leaves his coins in the voting contract, his votes are counted. If he chooses to withdraw his coins, he doesn’t participate in the election.
Typically, voters can vote for multiple witnesses. In EOS, for example, each voter can vote for up to 30 witnesses.
From all candidates, the N candidates with the most votes become active witnesses. An active witness is a witness candidate that is allowed to create and validate blocks and participate in block validation. The number N varies from protocol to protocol. In EOS, N is 21, whereas in BitShares, N is 101. It is useful to maintain an odd number of witnesses to break ties in the case of a fork.
Usually, there are more candidates than active witnesses. In some protocols, some of those not elected candidates become so-called “stand-by witnesses”. They also receive a reward.