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The No Award option exists precisely for the voter to register that for whatever reason, some to all of the available options are not considered to be worthy of award.
I gave out a lot of No Award this year*. I also gave out a lot of No Award in previous years, not always for the entire category (although there have been previous years when the shorter form offerings were pretty dire) but sometimes, and have ranked fairly popular and well-written works which I simply felt that, while enjoyable on a personal level†, were not quite up to the quality deserving of having "Hugo Award winner" plastered on future printings.
I have heard that some people always vote a straight No Award every year for the media presentation categories on the grounds that there shouldn't even be Hugos for those, and that the awards should stick to recognizing fans and professional writer/artists and not extruded Hollywood studio product, and this, according to the voting instructions, is a legitimate use of the ranking.
For whatever reason that people choose to use it, No Award is a perfectly valid option, in line with spoiling one's ballot when doing RL political voting (oh, how I wish I could have a straightforward "None of the Above" ticky-box on my Elections Canada ballots that if there were enough of, would send all the parties and their candidates back to try again), has been part of the Hugo voting process for decades, and has been used several times before this current kerfuffle (most notably on a Scientology-driven attempt to get an L. Ron Hubbard book as Best Novel in 1987, and a few times in the past decades as a clean sweep in the Dramatic Presentation categories when apparently there weren't any decent sfnal tv/movies available those years).
Also, I gave a shot to the various Puppy works in the packet (even if I ended up skimming most of them and flat-out quit that "Related Work" which was just a grumpy old man get-off-my-lawn cane-shaking screed with absolutely no relationship to sfnal things at all) just as I did to their attempts at puppification in previous years even before I knew what was going on with them, and again they were mostly terribad, besides having a suspiciously high congruence of VD and Torgerson's friends and immediate professional colleagues. Didn't they have any good writers in line with their purported ideology whom they could have promoted?
Honestly, I think it would be a greater dishonour to awardees past and present to have clearly subpar works elevated to rank among theirs purely on a pity allocation of "well, here's some of the least bad stuff that came out this year, so we might as well hand out a prize to someone for something for making the effort, eh".
* And for the record, I did not do my voting on a purely anti-slate line for political reasons, as people have been suggesting that voters who made use of the No Award option did, as I read over the non-Puppy Heuvelt story which won that category, twice, before deciding that, no, it still wasn't worthy of Best Novelette, in my opinion, even though I personally favour seeing more diversity in works available in translation.
† I really liked George R. R. Martin's A Dance With Dragons and indeed, got into the entire ASOIAF saga and spin-offs due to having read it from the Hugo Voter Packet after having avoided the franchise for years. But I still ranked it below No Award that year because I felt that the story presented within the 5th book did not even comprise so much as a complete subplot arc that significantly furthered the narrative as a whole and was simply a "to be continued" installment that could not stand alone, and thus, not Best Novel material at all.
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