On top of that, you then have to consider the potentially lower popularity of your favourite choice against that of the current lead contenders. Do you reduce your vote for the better of two evils so that your sincere preference has a better chance? Ugh.
I'm not trying to suggest tactical voting doesn't exist in other systems, but to suggest that it doesn't in Range voting is either misinformed or disingenuous.
With approval voting I have to make that decision, setting some kind of threshold of approval. With range voting it might be easier to just vote honestly.
At worst, everybody votes tactically and you get approval voting, which is still a good system. But sometimes the tactical decision is difficult, in which case range voting gives you the option of just voting honestly.
It's a good thing I didn't suggest it, then.
Valuing one voter over the others like that is a dangerous road to travel down.
Because whereas ordinal rankings at least arguably mean the same thing when different voters give them, cardinal scores don't have a consistent meaning, making all cardinal voting systems subject to GIGO problems in addition to any other issues.
> Range voting is the name of that system and, unlike Condorcet methods, it is not subject to Arrow's impossibility theorem.
No system that is not a form of ranked ballot system is "subject to Arrow's impossibility theorem", nevertheless, range voting is, beyond the GIGO problem faced by all cardinal methods, demonstrably subject to the same classes of tactical voting as approval voting, which means that while it is not in the class of of systems to which Arrow's theorem applies, it has flaws (from the perspective of the Arrow criteria) of the type that Arrow's theorem states that all the systems to which it applies must have. So the fact that Arrow's theorem doesn't apply to it doesn't actually make it any better.