A 5 cycles penalty seems too high. I would only do 1-3 cycle max, preferably 1 to start. While this is in effect we become more centralized therefore our security potentially drops.
Kevin brings up some good points about people just randomly choosing the leading vote rather than voting pass. And if we default to pass then we don’t need to implement the penalty. We can tell if a pass was implicit or not by whether it was cast at the last block of the cycle (default), or somewhere in between the cycle.
Autopass would only be useful if it is not the default and therefore requires a one time manual setting. If implemented it would be cool if the autopass option had a one time burn fee to deter it’s use.