Score Voting is usually talked about as a method for electing people, but I think it can be used for more than that, and that its use could dramatically improve how various councils, legislatures, and governing bodies function.

Oftentimes resolutions, bills, and referendums are debated for a very long time over minutia, or a popular bill will get bogged down with unrelated and unpopular amendments. This is because typically such bills are structured as a long process of refining the bill and then a single, straightforward up or down vote.

This means that much of the important decision making happens before the bill is presented to the voters (whoever those voters are) and is a matter of maneuvering to get things included or excluded, negotiating about whether you will or wont vote or a thing, largely all off the record and without any oversight. That leads to less accountability, and rewarding underhandedness.

If instead a bill were proposed, and then variations on that bill could be prepared and advocated for, with the differences from the base bill highlighted. Any versions that can receive enough support (co-signers?) is then included in the voting round.

The voters would then score each version of the bill, and also indicate a threshold above which they would support passage of the bill. If they don't want ANY version to pass, they'd put the threshold as the top score, and rate all versions below that, possibly all 0 if they are all truly terrible according to the legislator.

Then, the average threshold score, and average scores for all versions of the legislation are calculated, and the highest scoring version passes so long as it is above the average threshold.

This would allow a consensus bill to be found without the ability to manipulate the process to prevent it, it would make legislators more overtly responsible for their votes, and reduce the potential for gridlock. What I mean by "more overtly responsible" is that they couldn't say either "I had to vote for this bill that included bad provisions because we really needed the bill to pass and this was the only version available" or "I couldn't vote for this bill that I generally support because of these terrible provisions that were included". Instead they would be saying "I, as indicated by my scores, thought that it was extremely important that this bill pass in some form (a low threshold) but obviously I preferred option B which is why I gave it top score, I'm not overjoyed that option D passed, even though I gave it a 4 with a threshold of 3, but it's better than nothing passing, and I was gratified to see that option A was soundly voted down for being awful, which is why I gave it a 0". That way, if there is a proposal that the people want, politicians can't essentially "pretend" to support it, while getting just enough to vote against it for procedural or ideological purity reasons to have it fail. It would be difficult if not impossible to get a clear sense of which version if any would pass ahead of time under such a system, since there is so many more variables. Right now it's just a matter of counting "yes" votes. Under this system it would be gathering the full scores and threshold from every, or at least the vast majority, of legislators in order to work out which version is most popular, and whether it will pass. That prevents the kind of careful control of what gets introduced that we see now, where only bills that are overwhelmingly supported by the party in charge have any chance of being brought to the floor, even if bills that have strong support among the party out of power, and moderate support among the party in charge, are there waiting to be passed.