You would miss blocks until you are voted out if you take it offline. Doesn't this cause problems? Security, forking, transaction times... Etc.? If we had this happening frequently and with multiple delegates, this couldn't be a good thing, right?
After 0.6.x, active delegates can retract their accounts in order to instantly (at the start of the next round) be removed from the active 101.
Depending on how this is implemented, this could effectively give the functionality that toast wants for a proposal system. The important details:
1. What happens to votes for a delegate when the delegate is retracted?
2. Can you still vote for a delegate that has rectracted, even though it will not result in this delegate being elected?
If 1 is "Votes are still counted, but they don't matter toward the election" and 2 is "Votes for these delegates are still valid transactions, even though they do not count toward the election", then we have a functioning proposal system. All you would need to do is create a 0% delegate, immediately retract it, and now you have something in the system you can use to vote with without any consequences on the security of the network.