I was wondering about the initial nomination process, too. I think the problem with an album poll, vs. the earlier a band poll, is that you'll see a much wider spread of possible choices. Looking over the nomination thread, I'm hard-pressed to find a single album that’s nominated by even 20% of the people, which doesn't speak much to consensus. Furthermore, the band-with-the-most-albums tiebreaker isn't entirely fair: it'd penalize bands who've put out fewer albums, simply because they have less other options to use as a tiebreaker. It also can't deal with the possibility of a tie between albums from the same artist (how many Dylan albums are nominated already?).
Could I suggest a second preliminary round? Perhaps from the pool of nominated albums on March 23, everyone ranks 20 albums by a points system (your favorite gets 20 pts, second gets 19 pts…) and the however-many bands with the most points go to the voting rounds. That'll give a much more concrete, finely-graded system for rankings, and---since we're forced to vote for at least 10 albums we didn't nominate ourselves---it'll hopefully help albums of general quality to rise to the top by somewhat mitigating personal taste. Personal taste in albums can be sufficiently determined by the real vote-elimination portion.
Poll
