How to submit a vote as an SPO for Governance Actions

UPDATED: 8/22/2025

The following guide will walk you through how to submit a vote as an SPO for a Governance Action.

Credits to Earn Coin Pool for documenting the procedure.

Step 1 - Copy Governance Action ID

You will probably use resources like gov.tools, adastat.net or temp.vote to view Governance Actions and read about them. Once you are ready to vote on one of those actions as an SPO, you can copy the Governance id

In this example we copied Governance Action ID:

15f82a365bdee483a4b03873a40d3829cc88c048ff3703e11bd01dd9e035c916#0

You must use the Legacy Governance Action ID (CIP-105)

💡TIP: Optionally you can run governance state query with some jq filters to get information on the governance actions directly from the ledger. For this example, you can run:

cardano-cli conway query gov-state --mainnet | jq -r --arg govActionId "15f82a365bdee483a4b03873a40d3829cc88c048ff3703e11bd01dd9e035c916" '.proposals | to_entries[] | select(.value.actionId.txId | contains($govActionId)) | .value'

Step 2 - Vote with SPO Key Air Gapped Machine

⚠️ON AIR GAPPED MACHINE

With the Governance Action ID noted and copied move to your Air Gapped Machine.

First unlock your cold keys if locked

Please note we keep our keys in the $HOME/cold-keys folder for this example, please change path as needed

chmod u+rwx $HOME/cold-keys

Next vote by running the following command, but NOTE in this example we vote "YES" you can vote --yes, --no, --abstain

Under --governance-action-tx-id insert your id from the above step. Note #0 at the end. Remove the "#0" and the "0" is what goes in the next line: --governance-action-index 15f82a365bdee483a4b03873a40d3829cc88c048ff3703e11bd01dd9e035c916#0

cd $NODE_HOME
cardano-cli conway governance vote create \
--yes \
--governance-action-tx-id "15f82a365bdee483a4b03873a40d3829cc88c048ff3703e11bd01dd9e035c916" \
--governance-action-index "0" \
--cold-verification-key-file $HOME/cold-keys/node.vkey \
--out-file voted

Above we named the output file "voted" best practices might be to name it the governance action id

Step 3 - Copy voted file to Relay

Now we will take the "voted" file and copy to a warm machine to build the transaction. In this sample we will copy all our files to $NODE_HOME directory.

Step 4 - Find UTxO and change tx-in

We will find a UTxO (preferably with only ADA) to use to submit the transaction. Assuming you have a payment.addr file, run the following command. Otherwise swap $(cat payment.addr) with your payment address

cd $NODE_HOME
cardano-cli conway query utxo \
--address $(cat payment.addr) \
--mainnet

Step 5 - Build Transaction with the new UTxO

Replace utxo on the --tx-in line with your selected utxo. Also if you don't have payment.addr file, swap $(cat payment.addr) with your payment address in the --change-address line

cd $NODE_HOME
cardano-cli conway transaction build \
--mainnet \
--tx-in ec8c53495d26989a924f01d36a73f82952d4efac79b8ed534aca99fc111d9e5d#0 \
--change-address $(cat payment.addr) \
--vote-file voted \
--witness-override 2 \
--out-file vote-tx.raw

Step 6 - Copy vote-tx.raw file to Air Gapped Machine

Copy your vote-tx.raw file over to you air gapped machine to sign. In this sample we will copy all our files to $NODE_HOME directory.

Step 7 - Sign with SPO Cold Key

⚠️ON AIR GAPPED MACHINE

cd $NODE_HOME
cardano-cli conway transaction sign \
--tx-body-file vote-tx.raw \
--signing-key-file $HOME/cold-keys/node.skey \
--signing-key-file payment.skey \
--out-file vote-tx.signed

Re-lock your cold keys if you lock them

chmod a-rwx $HOME/cold-keys

Step 8 - Copy vote-tx.signed file to Relay

Copy the "vote-tx.signed" file to a warm machine to submit the transaction. In this sample we will copy all our files to $NODE_HOME directory

Step 9 - Submit the Transaction

cd $NODE_HOME
cardano-cli conway transaction submit \
--tx-file vote-tx.signed \
--mainnet

Congratulations you did it!

You can check your vote on cardanoscan.io by going to the governance action and clicking the votes tab at the bottom. For this sample: https://cardanoscan.io/govAction/gov_action1zhuz5djmmmjg8f9s8pe6grfc98xg3szglums8cgm6qwancp4eytqqmpu0pr?tab=votes

If you are getting errors, please double check paths. This guide was done using the typical paths and file name from the coincashew original guide.

Additional Resources:

https://developers.cardano.org/docs/get-started/cardano-cli/governance/submit-votes/developers.cardano.org

Contributors

Thanks to the following pools for helping to put together these guides. Please consider delegating to their pools to support them. Are you a pool? Consider buying them a coffee

Apex Cardano Pool - Ticker: APEX

Earn Coin Pool - Ticker: ECP

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