&quot;voting&quot; is a technical concept used in many distributed systems; even if it&#x27;s a purely technical concept that term is correct.<p>Voting also applies in hard-forks. Case-in-point, XT&#x2F;classic both had activation thresholds and voting.<p>Splitting the chain is not really useful unless you have a large majority with you for both technical and non-technical reasons, and so you vote.<p>Soft-forks and hard-forks aren&#x27;t so different in the happy-case. They both extend the same original chain, they both have concerns about two competing chains existing and wish to avoid that, they both change the validation layer in some way (though to lesser and greater extents).