# Voting on Governance Proposals

How to use the Celo CLI to participate in Goverance and create a Governance proposal.

## Governance​

Celo uses a formal on-chain governance mechanism to manage and upgrade the protocol. More information about the Governance system can be found in the Governance section of the protocol documentation.

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If you would like to keep up-to-date with all the news happening in the Celo community, including validation, node operation and governance, please sign up to our Celo Signal mailing list here.

You can add the Celo Signal public calendar as well which has relevant dates.

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In the following commands <VARIABLE> is used as a placeholder for something you should specify on the command line.

## Viewing Proposals​

A list of active proposals can be viewed with the following command:

celocli governance:list

Included will be three lists of proposals by status:

• Queued proposals have been submitted, but are not yet being considered. Voters can upvote proposals in this list, and proposals with the most upvotes from this list will be moved from the queue to be considered.
• Dequeued proposals are actively being considered and will pass through the Approval, Referendum, and Execution stages, as discussed in the protocol documentation.
• Expired proposals are no longer being considered.

## Understanding Proposal Details​

You can view information about a specific proposal with:

celocli governance:show --proposalID=<PROPOSAL_ID>

For example, the proposal 14 on Mainnet was as follows:

Running Checks:   ✔  14 is an existing proposalproposal:  0:    contract: Governance    function: setBaselineQuorumFactor    args:      0: 500000000000000000000000    params:      baselineQuorumFactor: 500000000000000000000000 (~5.000e+23)    value: 0metadata:  proposer: 0xF3EB910DA09B8AF348E0E5B6636da442cFa79239  deposit: 100000000000000000000 (~1.000e+20)  timestamp: 1609961608 (~1.610e+9)  transactionCount: 1  descriptionURL: https://github.com/celo-org/celo-proposals/blob/master/CGPs/0016.mdstage: Referendumupvotes: 0votes:  Yes: 30992399904903465125627698 (~3.099e+25)  No: 0  Abstain: 0passing: truerequirements:   constitutionThreshold: 0.7   support: 0.99883105743491071638   required: 29107673282861669327494319.531832308424 (~2.910e+25)  total: 30992399904903465125627698 (~3.099e+25)isApproved: trueisProposalPassing: truetimeUntilStages:  referendum: past  execution: 57 minutes, 59 seconds  expiration: 3 days, 57 minutes, 59 seconds

To see how many votes a proposal needs to pass (depending on what type of commands are being executed), you can refer to the requirements section of the respose.

In the proposal above, there is a constitutionThreshold target of "0.7" or 70% of votes must be in support, "0.998" or 99.8% of votes have currently voted "yes", the number of votes required to pass are 29.1M CELO, with 30.9M CELO currently voted in total.

## Voting on Proposals​

When a proposal is Queued, you can upvote the proposal to indicate you'd like it to be considered.

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If you are using a Ledger wallet, make sure to include --useLedger and --ledgerAddresses in the following commands.

celocli governance:upvote --proposalID=<PROPOSAL_ID> --from=<YOUR_VOTER_ADDRESS>

At a defined frequency, which can be checked with the celocli network:parameters command, proposals can be dequeued, with the highest upvoted proposals being dequeued first.

After a proposal is dequeued, it will first enter the Approval phase. In this phase, the Governance Approver may choose to approve the proposal, which will allow it to proceed to the Referendum phase after the configured length of time.

Once a proposal has reached the Referendum phase, it is open to community for voting.

celocli governance:vote --proposalID=<PROPOSAL_ID> --value=<Abstain|Yes|No> --from=<YOUR_VOTER_ADDRESS>

## Executing a Proposal​

If a Governance Proposal receives enough votes and passes in the Referendum phase, it can be executed by anyone.

celocli governance:execute --proposalID=<PROPOSAL_ID> --from=<YOUR_VOTER_ADDRESS>