There is currently some pushback against the ZCG election process in various places. Some examples:
https://x.com/naval/status/1994519212669505952
I totally understand the concerns with the ZCG election process. As I’m currently running myself for the ZCG committee I’m wondering who I actually have to convince to vote for me. Namely, who exactly are people on the Zcash Community Advisory Panel (ZCAP) that I have to convince and where are they are mostly active (I assume it’s mostly OGs active on this forum, so here we go).
However, I consider the coinholder voting, as it is currently implemented, not ready for making it effectively the main governance mechanism in Zcash.
Following are some problems, most of which could be alleviated with a better implementation. I’m only taking about voting with shielded ZEC here, as I have no experience with the transparent voting process.
Coinholder voting is not production ready
Shielded voting currently involves installing a separate voting tool which requires you to input your seed phrase, thereby effectively burning it. So one has to move the coins first and then vote with the old seed phrase, otherwise security would be compromised. I participated in the last two votes and this is very time consuming. Also the voting software is slow, has some bugs, and requires you sometimes to vote twice (for “internal” and “external” wallets). Voting on all questions in the following poll with all my ZEC required real dedication.
Before it’s not possible to vote from Zashi without compromising a Keystone seed phrase coinholder voting is only accessible to the most motivated power users and whales.
Whales totally dominate coinholder voting
This might partially be caused by the previous point and we won’t know until we fix that and run more elections, but if you look at the number of shielded ballots:
And the number of shielded ZEC that voted:
If you divide the of amount shielded ZEC that voted by the number of ballots you get a rough average between 23k and 67k ZEC per vote, depending on the question. At the current ZEC price of $460 that’s between $10M and $30M per vote.
To put that into perspective, having $30M liquid makes you a ultra-high-net-worth individual (UHNWI). UHNWIs constitute only 0.003% of the world’s population (see Wikipedia). Of course the numbers most likely also include “institutions” (like the Zcash Foundation) voting.
And ballots do not equal voters. Sometimes a single voter will vote with multiple ballots, so these averages are lower bounds.
A usual problem this will cause, especially if there is a lot of friction in the voting process, is voter fatique. It simply makes no sense for non-whales to vote.
Running voting authorities is very time consuming and brittle
I myself participated by running a voting authority in this election:
I didn’t take notes, so this is is a guestimate: It involved one long day (10-12 hours) where all the people running a voting authority (with me @artkor, @dismad, and @james_katz) had to sync in a Signal group (with the help of @aquietinvestor) to get the infrastructure up and running. Plus another 6-8 hours of ordering the server, setting it up, software installation, etc. So in total roughly 2 working days.
In the last election I didn’t participate myself in the end, because the coordination overhead would have been too large. However, from what I could see from the frequency and sheer number of messages in the corresponding Signal group the coordination effort was even higher.
I totally agree with @outgoing.doze that the process to run a voting authority should be simpler. But currently it’s neither simple nor robust.
The voting infrastructure is run by unpaid volunteers
In the last election the coinholders rejected the proposal to compensate the voting authorities, as proposed here:
For my effort the number of days in the proposal was too high and I usually charge a significantly higher day rate, but the proposed compensation number would have worked out as a decent day rate.
If the proposal was rejected because it was rather short, the number of days was too high, or due to significant pushback from @outgoing.doze I can only speculate.
If you look at the election result only 12,747 ZEC voted for this proposal. If you assume as a rough approximation that most people who ran voting authorities voted for this proposal (except for @outgoing.doze) you can clearly see that the unpaid volunteers running this infrastructure are not whales.
I’m as capitalist as they come, but a marxist would have fun with this situation. If the workers go on strike there will be no next election 
Inherent problems of coinholder voting
This is all in addition to the fact that coinholder voting is not a market, if you already hold ZEC there is no monetary cost attached to decision making.
Currently coinholder voting is definitely a whale oligarchy. If this will change with better voting UX remains to be seen.
Until then I wouldn’t make it the main governance mechanism in Zcash and I would like to experiment with other governance ideas, like futarchy, because coinholder voting doesn’t seem to be the market-based solution it’s advertised as.
My intuition says there is a better governance mechanism somewhere in the possible design space and we haven’t found it yet.
The consensus leans toward improving coinholder voting—but not yet elevating it as the main governance pillar—while exploring complementary models.