  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.
