No Dr. Rakolote, I'm a qualified assessor and moderator with 30 years experience. At PhD level the Quality Assurance gatekeeper is the panel, they are not a technical or procedural mechanics committee as you put it, they meet twice over the same candidate, at proposal and dissertation point, they are experienced scholars in their own right, they receive copies at least a week before to assess the work and critique it without influence from supervisors and examiners, who play a "coach" and moderator roles respectively
For my sins I also served on SENATE and Council, these two checkpoints rely heavily on the outcome of the panel, whose members also serve on SENATE, you can safely say the panel is a subcommittee of SENATE chaired by the Dean of Faculty in which the candidate is registered
I was merely responding to your inference, which I may have gotten it wrong, that consensus and majority vote has no place in research
I respect your experience on panels, but it is important to distinguish between procedural mechanics and the substantive weight of the qualification itself. Dissertation committees may indeed strive for consensus and, if that fails, resort to majority decisions. However, the legitimacy of the award does not rest solely on the voting procedure. It is safeguarded by layers of academic scrutiny, including external examiners, faculty boards, and ultimately the senate, all of which ensure that the dissertation meets rigorous scholarly standards. Thanks for engaging🇿🇦🙏🏽