Or you could go for an even richer system of score voting with integers out of a limited set. You can convert ordinal ranks to scores directly meaning the set

Or you could go for an even richer system of score voting with integers out of a limited set. You can convert ordinal ranks to scores directly meaning the set exactly same as number of candidates. By that, each median score represents median ordering in a ranked ballot. You may lose certain properties that are relevant in case of direct ties but nobody really cares about that in big constituencies. Heck, you can also keep counts of each score in case the dominant is needed for a tie breaker. Approval voting is a score system with a binary score. Rules are simple: in case of rank scores, candidate with lowest median rank wins, if there is a tie candidate with higher count of low scores wins. This converts IRV or other ranked system to Bucklin vote. In case of approval scores, replace lowest with highest.