@hubert @ben Indeed. One way to understand approval voting is just as the simplest version of range voting. There's a simplicity benefit to approval voting, there's more information with a larger range, one case for approval voting suggests that in practice, the extra information in the larger range doesn't often change outcomes, so the simplicity benefit of the binary choice outweighs. 1/
@hubert @ben That's an empirical claim. More theoretically, I'd suggest your initial concern, that people have different thresholds, a tough critic's 3 star film may be a gentler critic's 4 star film, binds more heavily with range voting, making the "more information" hard to interpret. I really like the interpretability of "my favorite, and those i'd be generously willing to accept" in approval voting. 2/