The voting is built into the bitcoin protocol-- the miners that find the next block are voting for the piece of software they are running.  If there is a schism and some miners are running other software then two chains could -- COULD -- emerge-- but one will rapidly become the dominant one. ( for a period the two chains will effectively double everyone&#x27;s bitcoins, but the losing chains coins will rapidly lose value as hashing power switches to the dominant chain.)<p>This could be chaotic so the debate is really how to avoid two co-existing chains in hard fork situation.<p>But bitcoin itself is, every 10 minutes, voting for what the &quot;right&quot; chain is, which is defined as the longest.<p>Right now today if you&#x27;re mining on a block and find out that there is a longer chain, the node switches.