A second vote on restructuring how Optimism’s Security Council is seated drew 8.71 million OP in favor and 4.60 million against, falling well short of the 16.54 million OP quorum requirement
The Optimism Collective’s governance forum confirmed on November 13, 2026 that a proposal to restructure how the network’s Security Council is seated has failed to reach quorum for the second consecutive time. The vote drew 8.71 million OP tokens in favor and 4.60 million against, a combined total well short of the 16.54 million OP quorum threshold required for the vote to count as decided either way.
The underlying proposal, originally opened for discussion on October 22, 2026, would change the mechanism by which Optimism’s Security Council, a body with emergency powers over the network’s infrastructure, gets its members. Under the proposed system, the Token House-elected “Lead” position would directly nominate candidates for Security Council seats, and those nominees would be automatically seated unless 20% of the network’s active, votable OP supply specifically voted to veto them. That represents a significant departure from the current system, which relies on direct cohort elections to fill Security Council seats.
Critics of the proposal, including delegate ETHBEAT according to discussion on the governance forum, have argued that the veto-based design has a structural flaw: because a nominee is seated by default unless a specific turnout threshold actively votes against them, low voter turnout effectively counts as approval rather than requiring affirmative support, reducing the practical influence that individual delegates and token holders have over who ultimately sits on the council.
With this second failed vote, the Optimism Foundation has announced that a third vote on the same, unchanged proposal will follow, suggesting the Foundation intends to continue bringing the measure back for further votes rather than revising its structure in response to the repeated quorum failures. Whether a third attempt will fare any differently depends heavily on whether turnout patterns shift, something neither of the first two votes has shown signs of.
The repeated quorum failures highlight a recurring challenge in decentralized governance generally: structuring a vote so that a meaningful decision requires genuine, active participation, rather than allowing low engagement to produce either an unintended default outcome or, as in this case, a vote that simply fails to resolve the underlying question at all. The full proposal and vote history are published on Optimism’s governance forum.
This post first appeared in Optimism’s Security Council Overhaul Fails to Reach Quorum for a Second Time
