I think “should” is probably better than “must” here. Putting requirements on voters beliefs feels like a huge can of worms. “should” gets the idea across, while leaving a little wriggle room. “must” means you’re trying to ascertain people’s mental state which feels like it can only cause problems.

We’re already applying the same level of mental scrutiny to making a DoV in the first place - a player can only take the action of declaring a DoV if they “believe” that they’ve won, and we have had DoVs struck down or retracted where that provably wasn’t the case.

We’ve also resolved some past DoVs as if the old “Every Researcher may cast Votes on that DoV to indicate agreement or disagreement…” DoV voting rule meant that players legally couldn’t cast a vote that didn’t indicate this (to the point where players have voted instinctively on a DoV and then acknowledged that their vote was invalid and should not be counted). It seems to be only as recently as last month that we realised that wasn’t actually the case.

I am generally wary of putting a “must” in the ruleset, though, and you’re right, the fallout maybe isn’t entirely clear. There was some talk on the link above that if a DoV were to pass with the support of some invalid votes then those votes would be upheld, but I’m not sure how much that’s actually true.

After some reflection, I think I’m leaning towards allowing bad faith DoV declarations and votes, but making them clearly against Fair Play. We already have “should not make a DoV primarily to delay the game by putting it into Hiatus” in there, a bit redundantly.

Withdrawn.