What I want to know is do candidates have to declare if they're paying someone else to run their node, are all current candidates running their own nodes now, or are some still hiring guys like badass? That turns me off much more than a tech guy sharing profits for votes, unless that person does some amazing work for komodo. Hiring a node operator only makes sense for community pools.
Whales probably need to hire node server techs too
Can't that be another attack vector BTW? If attacker is promising 50-60% return to voters and has multiple registrations on that candidate list, a lot of people will be voting for him.