This is definitely a B-manga, but it's a high B. Voting games where a large cast slowly gets whittled away into nothing are pretty common, so Sacrificial Vote shakes things up a bit with "social death". Embarrassing, incriminating, or otherwise compromising blackmail released to the internet. A gesture at realism which gets at Sacrificial Vote's strongest suit; suspense, social dynamics, and the breaking down of a society. The manga's first half focuses on how a single classroom is affected by the voting game, grudges carried out into life ruining consequence, popularity hierarchy inverting as cliques form and people try to use the threat of exposure totheir advantage, and attempts at rooting out the perpetrator and why they're doing it, hindered by the fact that any action taken must necessarily either be an individual one, or a group action that lets the perpetrator in on it. Despite that, this isn't really Death Note, where everyone puts their brains into overdrive and get into 5D Time Travel Chess with each other to solve the mystery. It's how people react to the voting game and break down in the face of it, turning a bunch of well-meaning and scared students into uncaring monsters who become more and more complicit in the cruelty, or exceed it.

The second half, meanwhile, expands out into the entire school. While less of a court of knives than part one, it carries on with the same tone in a tug-of-war, faculty attempting to re-assert the legitimacy of a rapidly decaying social order. Both are carried by a realistic art style, further grounding the tone and shooting it into grotesquery as shocked and horrified expressions contort in uneasy ways. I also appreciate that, while the premise is inherently cynical (everyone has a dark secret and everyone becomes complicit in punishing those they don't like), there are enough moments of hope and humanization that it doesn't just feel like an elaborate Aristocrats joke.

Not to say that it's a masterfully crafted narrative. There's so many characters milling in and out that it can be difficult to keep track of them at times. Timelines either don't match up precisely well or skirt the edges of believability. I feel like the central mystery of the second part got introduced way too late such that it kind of came across like ass pulling the last piece of the puzzle. There are no supernatural elements at play, but the hacking is borderline hollywood magic (this is less egregious than other people make it out to be unless you have a hard on for uber accurate IT or whatever). And what I think is most alienating, it can be a bit exploitative at times. With one exception (maybe two), every female character's blackmail has been sexual in nature, meanwhile the men's blackmail seems to be 50/50. It was a bit jarring to go from "leaked sex tape", "leaked sex tape" to "this guy tampered with food at his convenience store job". It's not pornography, but there's a rank smell which I think largely improves by part 2.

If the shock incurs a "storyteller's debt", then the rest of Sacrificial Vote pays it off well enough. I don't know if I'd re-read it, and the road signs on the cover accurately signal what you can expect from the story (putting aside that at no point does this happen), but there were some evocative moments and a good experience. Like I said, it's a high B.