[Houshalter]

Have you ever noticed how star rating systems are completely useless? People either rate 5 stars or 1 star, and very rarely in between. Most places have switched to simple like/dislike based systems. E.g. reddit or youtube.

And that's when people have no incentive to lie...

[dvorak365]

Score ratings are not as useful when the scales are poorly defined, as many internet scoring systems are. Many internet scoring systems want you to measure quality to some universal standard that should apply to all things past and present in the same way. A range voting election asks you to measure quality relative only to the options you are presented with.

Here's a hypothetical example involving 3 different shampoos. All 3 work. One smells bad. One smells decent. One smells great.

If I were to review these on Amazon, I would likely give them 3, 4, 5 stars respectively. All 3 of them worked, but I have a preference. I could imagine a theoretically worse shampoo that didn't work, or even worse, made all my hair fall out. Such a shampoo would be worth a rating of 0 stars. I don't give my least favorite shampoo I actually used 0 stars because I can imagine that in the future I may come across something worse, and it doesn't seem correct to put a functional product on the same level as a harmful one.

If I were to vote (using a score system) for which one of these 3 shampoos I would like my workplace to stock, then it is much simpler. 0, 2, 5 stars for each option, respectively. I don't have to worry about a hypothetical worse 4th option in the future skewing my results now. If a future election is held with that worse, 4th option, then I can give it a 0 and adjust my previous 0 and 2 star ratings accordingly.