@cfrank said in Pairwise Matrix / Preference / Ranked Pairs / Cardinal pairwise:
Cardinals are ordinals with an enriched structure, since in addition to ordering they have some sort of “difference magnitude” structure.
This is the answer. You can rank three candidates 1, 2, 3 but give them scores (out of 10) of 10, 1, 0. So that tells you more than just your ranking.
Obviously in real life elections, there's debate about the meaning of the scores and whether they're just used as a strategical device rather than a genuine measure of preference difference, but that's for another day.