Yep. Ranking something below No Award on you ballot does potentially help it win over something you ranked even lower, but only that, because your vote cannot go to it until everything above it is eliminated (and the No Award test still guarantees that if 50% of the voters put something below No Award, it cannot win even if by some quirk of elimination it ends up on top).
The actual occasion mistake people make is to try to vote negatively while not expressing a positive preference, ie:
Category I know nothing about: 1. No Award. 2. Thing I hate second most. 3. Thing I hate most.
The problem with this is that everything you leave off your ballot is always considered to have been ranked below everything you ranked. So in the above situation, if there was a thing you didn't despise, you are, in fact, helping the things you hate beat the thing you were only meh about.
This is a key thing because this is a specific quirk of the SPV system. It's entirely possible to have a voting system that only cared about relative ranking within your ballot --where things you didn't know anything about neither gained nor lost to your ballot (this is very useful when you expect that most voters will only read/play a subset of your nominees). However, that's not what SPV does.
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Date: 2015-04-06 12:45 am (UTC)The actual occasion mistake people make is to try to vote negatively while not expressing a positive preference, ie:
Category I know nothing about:
1. No Award.
2. Thing I hate second most.
3. Thing I hate most.
The problem with this is that everything you leave off your ballot is always considered to have been ranked below everything you ranked. So in the above situation, if there was a thing you didn't despise, you are, in fact, helping the things you hate beat the thing you were only meh about.
This is a key thing because this is a specific quirk of the SPV system. It's entirely possible to have a voting system that only cared about relative ranking within your ballot --where things you didn't know anything about neither gained nor lost to your ballot (this is very useful when you expect that most voters will only read/play a subset of your nominees). However, that's not what SPV does.