Range Voting Sucks
Range voting is a very simple voting system. You rate the candidates on a scale like 1 to 10. And the candidate with the best rating wins. It has a lot of nice properties over other voting systems. There is a Center for Range Voting that claims it's the best voting system and crushes all others. Particularly they run computer simulations to see how good different voting systems work under different situations. Something I have done myself and confirmed - range voting is pretty good.
The problem is it sucks in practice. Range voting has already been implemented. See the ubiquitous 5 star rating. That pervades every online app these days. Star ratings are basically the same as range voting - you are rating items on a scale and averaging together everyone's ratings.
The problem with 5 star ratings is no one uses them correctly. 99% of people either give 5 stars or 1 star. The middle stars are rarely used. When people do use them, they interpret them wildly different from each other. Some people think 3 stars means "average", and other see it as very below average.
Many places have replaced 5 star ratings with just like/dislike or upvote/downvote. Youtube did it. Steam did it. Reddit is entirely based on it.
And this is a real world scenario where there isn't a huge incentive to lie or vote tactically. It doesn't really matter if you rate a video 3 stars or 5 stars, there's little point in lying.
Voting for democratic elections matters a lot, and people do have a huge incentive to vote tactically. They will give all the candidates they want to win 10, and everyone else 0. Doing anything else hurts you. Range voting punishes honesty.
This reduces to just approval voting. So why bother with range voting at all?
In the future I will discuss my issues with approval voting. Mainly that it reduces expressibility, requires highly tactical voting, and doesn't seem to help real elections.
