Ranked-choice voting has been implemented elsewhere. It reduces the incidence of 'strategic voting', where voters see that their preferred candidate is non-viable, and so vote for a candidate that they dislike (but less than the other leading candidate).

The point isn't 'quality of candidates', which is highly subjective, but to more accurately reflect the will of the voters.

I'd argue that you don't really need empirical data for that, since game theory already proves that's the case.

Don't most political parties across the world use some form of ranked choice for internal elections within their parties?

Makes sense that they'd want the best consensus amongst themselves, but not for us, the people they "represent"

As an Irish person, we have ranked choice single transferrable voting, one big benefit I see is that people can vote for less popular candidates that they closely align with without throwing away their vote, since when the candidate is eliminated your vote is transferred to your next choice.

One other thing that I thinks is very important is proportional representation, which means that for a given constituency, instead of a single candidate being chosen multiple are, for example is my constituency we have 5 Teach Dáile (members of our Dáil/parliament) This means that less popular candidates will have a real chance of getting a seat. It also means that more of the population is represented, for example in my constituency each candidate would get on average about 15%+ of the vote, meaning that 75%+ of the voting population are represented, unlike the 40% or so that a two party system usually has

And it's not confusing, we're thought how it works in school and voting is the easy part, counting us more tricky, but is understandable when properly explained

Ireland :)