It appears that all out-of-box Drupal voting modules like to rate specific content. Our system, however, is about rating all the terms attached to a node behind the scenes without the user knowing it-- think Spotify or Pandora where the user thumbs up or down a track but is really rating item attributes behind the scenes.
Solution: Rate Referenced
Rate 2 (no official dev release available at the time of posting this) lets the user vote on any entity (node, taxonomy term..), and Rate Referenced cascades that vote down to an entity referenced on the entity (ex, a taxonomy term) which has its own rate field and widget.
Example: Think like Pandora
* A song as a Node
* Songs' categories (genres, style, instrumentation) as Taxonomy Terms
* User votes "on the Song," but the rating we care about is actually on the song's specific categories