An Examination of Ranked Choice Voting in the United States, 2004-2022

TL;DR

This paper empirically investigates the real-world performance of ranked-choice voting in U.S. elections from 2004 to 2022, finding that its theoretical flaws are rarely observed in practice, except for issues like ballot exhaustion.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of RCV's practical weaknesses across multiple elections over nearly two decades.

Findings

RCV's flaws are rarely observed in real elections

Ballot exhaustion frequently causes majoritarian failures

RCV generally performs well despite theoretical issues

Abstract

From the perspective of social choice theory, ranked-choice voting (RCV) is known to have many flaws. RCV can fail to elect a Condorcet winner and is susceptible to monotonicity paradoxes and the spoiler effect, for example. We use a database of 182 American ranked-choice elections for political office from the years 2004-2022 to investigate empirically how frequently RCV's deficiencies manifest in practice. Our general finding is that RCV's weaknesses are rarely observed in real-world elections, with the exception that ballot exhaustion frequently causes majoritarian failures.