>whereas the moderates will score their candidates, say, 7 or 8 and score the ones they don't like 3 or 4 Indeed, you should use whole available range. But the

>whereas the moderates will score their candidates, say, 7 or 8 and score the ones they don't like 3 or 4 Indeed, you should use whole available range. But there's still incentive to differentiate more than max/min, because otherwise you don't get any influence to choose between other candidates. For example with candidates: A-best, B-lesser evil, C-evil; instead of scoring max/0/0 it would be more reasonable to vote max/something/0. Voting system cannot give you result reflecting your preferences if you don't provide them! Maybe another way to look at this: there's only so much influence single ballot has, and you can spend it to either push A above B/C, or A/B above C. It's a tradeoff, but score voting allows you to dial in the ratio you want. Falling back to approval is strictly less expressive.