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In many political decision contexts, like for example committees at the German federal-state level, decisions are made by groups in face-to-face meetings. Within these groups, decisions are often neither reached by voting, i.e. by an open show of hands, nor by secret ballot. Rather, after a period of negotiation and deliberation, a result is presented and if none of the group members openly disagrees with it, the decision is adopted.At the level of observation, we are dealing with a phenomenon that can be characterized as “apparent unanimity”. But the result differs from actual unanimity.Based on audio-visual data from committee meetings as well as face-to-face group experiments, the article presents a micro-ethnographic analysis of practices and interaction sequences that characterize these specific forms of decision-making. A special focus is put on cases in the experimental data in which during an ongoing process, groups shift from sought unanimity to majority vote.