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

Adam Graham-Squire and David McCune

Papers from arXiv.org

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.

Date: 2023-01, Revised 2023-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
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