The Clarke has been doing a great job of this, and I think the WFC tries to read everything, too. I suspect Tanya is referring to the Hugo and Nebula Awards, which can easily come down to popularity contests. The more often you appear on the short form, the more often you may make a ballot just because you made the ballot last year. That the story is also good doesn't mean it's one of the five best of the year. (And can we now say, how to you narrow down to five? The Oscars have given up on that number.)

I preferred when we could just nominate things that impressed us, and everything above a certain number made the short list for voting. I saw more variety with that system, I think.