It would appear I was too quick to assign blame - this recent rash of missed votes was due to Company 0 voting wallets going offline for a few hours. However, the explanation above still stands in the context of stakepools episodically missing votes despite them being cast in a timely fashion.
Thank you @jy-p for the detailed response. Some numbers from Dcrstats DB for the last 24 hours (last block #40321): Blocks mined: 283 Estimated number of votes: 280 * 5 = 1415 votes; Real number of votes: 1233 ( 87.13% ) Missed tickets: 1415 - 1233 = 182 ( 12.86% ) "Yes" votes: 1220 "No" votes: 13
I can suggest you to use a stakepool. We have 3 voting wallets in separate geographic locations so this problem should never happen to you again if the wallet goes down: https://stakepool.dcrstats.com/
The PoW mining pools have incentive to figure out their issues, since there reward is diminished. So I'm not worried about this part. However, I'm still uncomfortable with combined control of PoW and PoS resources. This should make it clear why. I'm also glad to hear this current phenomenon was just a C0 issue, but this points to another problem. There cannot be proper decentralization unless these tickets are managed by third parties with financial interest in voting. (Pssst, we've got 4 wallets on our pool). Although I understand the need to control voting rights at this point.
Since this was brought up I am curious and want to ask what that is. Is that that developer subsidy funds? or part of the premine funds? or something else?
Assumably the devs manage their own wallets, and they are not just all held in a single "Company 0 voting wallet".
"missed votes was due to voting wallets going offline for a few hours" This is precisely why the item recently posted on the roadmap "Separate voting into its own independent process, similar to dcrticketbuyer" is of a high priority. Being able to have a dcrvoter that can autolaunch, does not require an unlocked wallet, and that a user can run from redundant locations (without having to deploy your own pool or rely on a 3rd party pool), will prevent this situation and loss of funds for many, as well as provide better protection for your wallet.