> no clear mapping between actual subjective preferences (which can be consistently reduced to ordinal, but not interval, measures) and ballot markings, with th

> no clear mapping between actual subjective preferences (which can be consistently reduced to ordinal, but not interval, measures) and ballot markings, with the result that the same preferences by different voters produce different ballot markings No, you completely misunderstand. There's no universal reference for what scores "mean". You can give candidates from, say 0-5 stars in terms of how much support you want to give them in the race. That's it. 5 = most support, 0 = no support. It's ONLY relative to the actual pool of candidates in the election. People can just learn to understand this clear fact, and ballots can be marked as such as "least support" to "full support". And educating people about this is easier than educating them about IRV and all it's weirdness (and more honest than making false claims about IRV). There are NO cultural issues or biases or problems here in terms of what a score "means". > If you want to fix the problems caused by loser elimination in IRV… I don't know what you mean here, but it isn't IRV, it's some other rank system. Tons have been proposed, none are perfect, all are far harder to calculate and understand than Star voting. Ranked Pairs is actually pretty good, probably the best way to handle ranked ballots. I'm not sure what you're proposing.