If you have a 36V battery and 12V lights then can't you just run them in series to match voltage. I'm curious though is a 12V switch with a LED an active component i.e. you could have a 12V LED switch and two 12V main lights (front and back) and connect them to a 36V battery in series. I'm assuming you can't do this as the switch will be configured not to drop the voltage in series somehow. I'm guessing a little bit of experimenting with a multimeter or an online circuit tester might give you some answers. Here is a circuit for 48V (as I couldn't find one for 36V) but you get the idea. So you could have lets say a 36V connection powering two 12V front lights and 1 12V rear light in series without issues and no additional components required as long as you want everything on at the same time which you would do with lights. So if you don't need to use resistors you save yourself the small power loss there.
when you see LED lights that say compatible with 36-60V do they actually have a circuit inside to convert to optimal voltage or simply operate with more intensity the higher the voltage? You get many LED torches that have multiple brightness levels and simply control voltage to the LED assembly, sometimes it looks like different LEDs but other times its the same LED with greater intensity.
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