Quote Originally Posted by Vincent, Thunder God View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Award Guy View Post
Nobody "just chooses". I go to various people, ask them all to vote for the categories that are tied (without even revealing who the tied members are - in other words, all nominees are listed so to give those a little way behind chance of an upset, creating fairness) and then hope for an outcome. If there is still a tie, then I go to get more votes. I always make sure I get at least three people involved with each tie so even they don't know who will win until the winners are revealed.
I had no idea this was that common, cool. All the more reason to ask the opinion of the general public IMO.

Seems fair enough Bob, but of course who you chose is also subjective. It seems to me that the Ciddies are a relatively democratic process, so I think it would be reasonable to involve everyone. That way, who eventually wins is actually decided in a fair manner, not by a minimum of three people.

In fact, one could argue it's not even fair to take any kind of revote, in which case the original tally could merely be listed as a draw and have two Ciddies awarded.

Either a full revote, or stick with the draw. Three people is better than one, but it's hardly close to how many people vote in total. Who's with me?
Nobody likes a tie. They used to happen and it was dreadful. Tie-breaking makes things exciting, and it's very fair too as people win by 1 vote extremely often. It's effectively just keeping the voting round open for a little bit longer on some awards.

The tie-breakers are chosen randomly. You have no idea how much I try to avoid any bias in things. Every person with a certain amount of posts in the past six months that has been active inside the past month is put into a list, and the tie-breakers are selected using Excel's random number feature.

The winner is not decided on by the three people, it should be noted, though. It's decided on by roughly 100 people, all of who chose to vote for their respective nominees and, before the last three tie-breaking voters came in (remember, they also see every single nominee and have no idea of which nominees are tied), certain people were tied. The only difference with tie-breaking, really, is that it is done after voting is closed and they are unable to vote for anything but those awards which are known to have a tie in them somewhere.

There is no way I could be more fair on the matter!