>[ben there]Might as well just go with the simpler Approval voting… It’s simpler, and
>more effective in my experience.

I partially agree. The most effective strategy under Range voting is to always vote max or min score for each candidate that you think is a real
contender to win. Any other vote could be considered a partial abstention.
If the voting instructions are poor or minimal many voters will accidentally partially abstain which will understandably make them angry. But if the instructions are well written then I do not think that this will happen to a significant degree.

I like Approval voting but I see allowing partial abstentions as being a small improvement. I don’t like the idea of encouraging frequent accidental partial abstentions so my support for Range Voting is very sensitive to the context and voting instructions.

See also the Range Voting advocacy site’s comparison of Range vs. Approval and make up your own mind:
http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVapp.html

Renaming candidates to letters…:

>If you vote 6 for candidate A and 4 on B
Assume that we are using Range with scores 0-9.

If a voter like this discovers that B won and that A was close to winning, that voter might be angry that they did not instead vote 9 for A and 0 for B.

I think that it is good and fine that a voter is allowed to vote for/against candidates with less then full strength but I think that as system designers we should work to make sure that the voter is aware that they made a vote with weaker strength then they could have made.

If you vote 6 for candidate 1 and 4 on 2, even if that’s below 1 and above for 2, you still add less to 2 than you take away from 6, don’t you? If you assume both are lower/higher then you add/subtract more/less than the other candidate. Perhaps I am making a logical error (I was up late last night), but I don’t really think its abstaining per se.

There used to be a system for board room voting where everyone turned a nob, and that either increased or decreased the voltage on the line depending on which way you twisted the nob. At the end you could measure how strongly opposed or for it the board was by measuring the current. Range voting is very much the same sort of idea.