Range/score voting suffers from the vary serious problem that there is no consistent mapping from subjective preferences to ballot markings; it suffers from the cultural variability that affects numeric ratibg systems in general; approval voting has a similar problem.

These systems can be very good in situations different from common public elections where there is a consistent meaning for ballot markings (e.g., approval makes good sense in non-secret-ballot elections where a vote to approve an option is a binding commitment to participate if the option is selected.)