Modeling the Outcomes of Vote-Casting in Actual Elections

How often do events of interest to voting theorists occur in actual elections? For example, what is the probability of observing a voting cycle – an outcome in which no candidate beats all other candidates in pairwise comparison by majority rule? When there is a candidate who beats all others in such pairwise comparisons – a Condorcet winner – what is the probability that a voting method chooses this candidate?What is the probability that voters have an incentive to vote strategically – that is, cast their votes in ways that do not reflect their true preferences? Voting theorists have analyzed these questions in great detail, using a variety of statistical models that describe different distributions of candidate rankings.