I’m very uncomfortable with telling people to compromise their privacy in order to exercise their voting rights.
Requiring people to unshield funds is exactly that, especially given the lack of tooling to prevent trivial linkability by amount. Made worse by the above concerns about IP address linkability.
I also worry about the security-of-funds aspect. People using cold wallets would need to either move funds out of their cold wallet (taking a risk), fiddle with their cold wallet private key (taking a risk and lacking tooling), or forego voting using their full holding.
The conjunction of the two of pretty bad. I conjecture that many “serious” ZEC holders use cold wallets or shielded funds, for good reasons. If these are effectively excluded from the vote, it’s unclear what sample we’re getting.
This might still be acceptable as a one-time temporarily solution for an advisory vote, but it must not become a recurring or binding mechanism.