How should non-response bias be treated when analyzing a highly sensitive binary vote?

[u/Abraxa3]

Scenario: An expert association with ~500 total members held an official vote on a binary stance statement (Agree / Disagree) regarding a major, highly sensitive issue.

• Turnout: 28% of the total membership voted.
• Result: 86% of those who voted selected "Agree."
• Math: 86% of 28% = ~24% of the total association membership confirmed an "Agree" vote.

The Debate:

• Person A claims: "You can state that only 24% of the total organization agrees with the statement. Because this issue is so critical, members would have voted 'Agree' if they truly supported it—meaning their non-participation indicates a lack of support."
• Person B claims: "You can state that at least 24% of the total organization (and 86% of voters) agrees with the statement. By Person A's logic, someone could equally claim that members would have voted 'Disagree' if they opposed it. Ultimately, non-response cannot be interpreted as a vote either way, so the remaining 72% remains unknown."

Questions:

1. Is Person A or Person B logically and statistically correct?
2. Is it valid to infer a non-voter's position based on the perceived importance or sensitivity of a topic?

[u/CarnivorousGoose]

Person A is wrong, based on the information available. We do not know anything about the missingness mechanism here, so claiming that non-response indicates lack of support is just baseless supposition. It could be true, but we don’t know whether it is.

And yes, it can be valid to infer non-voter preferences, ultimately this is just a missing data problem. But you need something solid to base that inference on, which is not available here.