First off, wow! How cool to get nominated for Book of the Righteous. Thank you so much to the judges and to Morrus for throwing this very cool shin dig.
To Greg: Respectfully, it depends on what your definition of "fair" is when you say one person one vote is the foundation of all fair voting mechanisms. Weighted voting systems have a long and happy history and are certainly fair if you're trying to get a statistical sampling of the "middle" rather than the fringes and if you're trying to give voice to the minority as well as the majority.
Voting systems should be built to answer questions. More often, they force questions. For instance, last year's voting system (I think) wanted to ask the question "what is the best product in the opinion of the ENWorld community?" It ended up answering the question, "What product is the best in the eyes of the most members of the ENWorld community plus voters from outside this community who have been directed here by publisher web sites?"
A weighted scheme seeks to answer the question "What's the product that's rated highly across the board, not just by the simple majority." It's an effort to achieve consensus rather than simple majority, to find an answer nearly everyone feels good about. I think that's very fair.
The difficulty with the 10-0 ranking system in most contexts is that it is extremely gameable by the minority, yielding the same problems as one person, one vote only worse -- rather than the minority getting stuck with the choice they disagree with made by the majority, the majority can get stuck with a decision made by a passionate majority willing the game the system. The way to avoid this sort of thing in weighted voting is to have very small gradiations (1-3 for instance - the wider the margin available, the more gameable the system) or to require voters to rank the products sequentially so that all products receive votes.
BUT, I think what Morrus is counting on is that this year the voting is actually closed to ENWorld members (if I recall correctly). I think the assumption is that community members are going to be faithful and fair and not game the system. This is a fair assumption, I think. It will likely be a tiny fraction of people who will vote dishonestly (Let's be frank: 10-0-0-0-0 would be a dishonest vote looking at this year's nominees. Sure, I love Monsternomicon. Sure I'll rate it highly. But I would be genuinely insane if I thought its competitors deserve 0s. All of the categories include incredibly good products, as everyone has commented. Differences of opinion are of course the point of voting in the first place, but I defy anyone, no matter how passionate their opinion, to make a rational argument that any of these categories feature a genuine 10-0-0-0-0 disparity.). So, given that voting 10-0-0-0-0 is pretty clearly gaming the system, remember, you will have logged in: Morrus will know who you are.
But beyond that, the question we're trying to answer is "what is the product the ENWorld community thinks is the best of these nominees." Perhaps the feeling on Morrus' part is that if this community wants to game the system, or members of it do, well, that's a reflection of what the community wants to do. Personally, I'm HIGHLY prejudiced toward Green Ronin products (the company being owned by dear friends), but as a community supporter, I'm not going to go voting 10-0-0-0 for their products. I have faith that my fellow ENWorld members will be similarly fair.
Aaron
