I think approval voting ballots have a pretty reasonable interpretation: if you would tolerate this person in this office then vote for them, if not then don't.

I think approval voting ballots have a pretty reasonable interpretation: if you would tolerate this person in this office then vote for them, if not then don't. The winner of the election is the one with the highest approval rating. If it's a three candidate election and there's one person you like, one person you don't, and one you're ambivalent about then it gets a little more complicated if you want to vote strategically. Generally, you'd vote yes to the first, no to the second, and for the third you can either vote for them or not based on whether you're more worried that your favorite candidate will lose or that your least favorite candidate will win. Range voting is a bit more expressive because you can rank candidates on a scale of one to ten or whatever, but the problem with range voting in real elections is that voters have the most influence over the result when they only use maximum or minimum ratings, thus a minority of strategic voters can outvote a majority of honest voters. Approval voting solves that by forcing everyone to follow the strategic voting strategy. STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) voting is another way to solve that problem. STAR voting works like range voting to select the top two candidates, then does a runoff between those top two after maximizing everyone's voting preferences. It's not perfect, but it's a way to allow people to express ratings that are more subtle than yes/no for each candidate while still giving people who vote honestly the same voting power in most situations as people who vote strategically.