Elections Example

The validator election process is an iterative process. This examples covers a full election where 5 validators compete for 3 slots in the active set while 5 nominators vote for them.

Consider the following initial setup:

Nominator	Stake	Nominations
One	100 CTC	Alice & Bob
Two	200 CTC	Alice & Bob
Three	300 CTC	Alice
Four	400 CTC	Bob, Charlie & Dave
Five	500 CTC	Alice & Dave

Validator	Nominations (count)
Alice	4
Bob	3
Charlie	1
Dave	2
Eve	0

1. First, we must calculate the approval stake of each validator; this is the total support for them by all nominators.

Validator	Total	Detail
Alice	1100 CTC	100 + 200 + 300 + 500
Bob	700 CTC	100 + 200 + 400
Charlie	400 CTC	400
Dave	900 CTC	400 + 500
Eve	0 CTC	0

2. We remove any validators which do not have any support from nominators. Eve will never be elected, so we remove it from the set.

3. After this, we can calculate the initial scores for each candidate. In each round, the validator with the lowest score gets assigned a slot. This is calculated by the formula 1 / stake

Validator	Stake	Score
Alice	1100 CTC	1 / 1100 = 0.00091
Bob	700 CTC	1 / 700 = 0.00143
Charlie	400 CTC	1 / 400 = 0.0025
Dave	900 CTC	1 / 900 = 0.0011

4. The candidate with the lowest score is Alice. It has its slot reserved. After the first round, the weights of each nominator votes get updated to Alice being already elected. This makes the votes of those who picked Alice stronger. The formula is the following:

   candidate_score = candidate_score + ((voter_budget * voter_load) / candidate_approval_stake)

5. After updating the weights, we recalculate the scores for each validator:

Validator	Score
Bob	0.00182
Charlie	0.0025
Dave	0.00162

6. Validator Dave gets the next available slot and we update the nominator weights and validator scores again.

Validator	Score
Bob	0.00143
Charlie	0.0025

7. We end up with Bob taking the last slot. All 3 slots are filled and we have the election result