WP: Range voting is the newest in the sense of people being aware of it and promoting it: If you're rating a video on YouTube you give it one to five stars, and they take that information and show you the average score of all the people who bother to rate it. We use it with a report card. The valedictorian of a school is the winner of a range vote by the teachers for each of their classes. In the Olympics, they hold up those cards to rate someone's performance—that's another example. People are pretty familiar with the idea. Nobody has given a convincing argument that there's anything seriously wrong with it—the one thing you sometimes hear is it's complicated, but that's about it.
MJ: In 2000, mathematician Warren Smith published a study where he ran simulations to determine which of the common voting methods gave the most satisfactory, or least regrettable, outcome for the greatest number of voters. He found that range voting was the most fair.
WP: That one paper has convinced a lot of people that we ought to be taking range voting pretty seriously.
