Range voting or score voting is a voting method for single-seat elections, in which voters give each candidate a score, the scores are added (or averaged), and the candidate with the highest total is elected. It has been described by various other names including the point system, ratings summation, 0-99 voting, average voting, and utility voting. It is a type of cardinal voting method.
A crude form of range voting was apparently used in some elections in Ancient Sparta, by measuring how loudly the crowd shouted for different candidates. This has a modern-day analog of using clapometers in some television shows and the judging processes of some athletic competitions.
Modern uses of range voting can commonly be found in Likert scale customer satisfaction surveys (such as for a restaurant), automated telephone surveys (where one is asked to press or say a number to indicate their level of satisfaction or likelihood), and any mechanism that includes "giving some number of stars" as a rating (such as rating movies on IMDb, products at Amazon, apps in the iOS or Google Play stores, etc.) Range voting is common for things where there is no single winner: for instance on the Web, sites allow users to rate items such as movies (Internet Movie Database), comments, recipes, and many other things.
Sports such as gymnastics rate competitors on a numeric scale, although the fact that judges' ratings are public makes it less likely for them to engage in blatant tactical voting.
A multi-winner variant, re-weighted range voting, is used to select the nominees for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.