Our constitution currently says this for ordinary decisions:

Everything within the authority of SC that doesn't require an extraordinary decision can be decided with a simple majority (more than 50%) of a full SC (vacant seats count as abstaining).

An exception to that is when there is when the conflict of interest balance condition is suspected to be violated. In that case, all non-involved currently serving SC members will have a simple majority decision over whether there is a violation.

This means, that any ordinary decisions requires 4 approvals to go through - and that's no matter how many seats are vacant or how many SC members abstain the vote.

This means that there is no such thing as "abstaining due to conflict of interest". Anyone abstaining is effectively voting against.

This means:

• Conflicts of Interest declarations in the SC are a farce. Example: No matter whether Tom is working at Anduril or not and whether he abstains the vote or not - the result for a vote to disallow job postings of Anduril on Discourse will always require 4 votes in favor, and he won't be one of them. He can't abstain from the vote effectively.
• Some answers in Should community-related Conflicts of Interest be considered for the SC election? SC-election-2025#192 assume that SC members can "recuse themselves from decisions affecting their team", but that clearly doesn't work. If 3 members of the SC are part of the Nix team, even if they recuse themselves, this effectively turns a simple majority decision into an unanimous agreement requirement of the remaining 4 members.

I have no idea how this can be fixed well.