 The voting methods discussed in this section can be viewed as generalizations of scoring methods, such as Borda Count. In a scoring method, a voter’s ranking is an assignment of grades (e.g., "1st place", "2nd place", "3rd place", ... , "last place") to the candidates. Requiring voters to rank all the candidates means that (1) every candidate is assigned a grade, (2) there are the same number of possible grades as the number of candidates, and (3) different candidates must be assigned different grades. In this section, we drop assumptions (2) and (3), assuming a fixed number of grades for every set of candidates and allowing different candidates to be assigned the same grade. 