Recent American experience with ranked voting systems shows that a little voter education goes a long way. Burlington, VT just held its second ever instant runoff voting election. Of 8,980 total ballots, only four were invalid. That’s a 0.04 percent error rate. Less fatally, only one voter did not use all five of his/her rankings, according to Rob Richie.²

Here is an example of the ballot voters used.

1. Donald Horowitz has advocated instant runoff voting/alternative vote. Ben Reilly and Andrew Reynolds have variously advocated and highlighted the single transferable vote.
2. UPDATE: Actually, the voter did not specify a first choice.

What’s more, Australia uses IRV (alternative vote, etc.) to elect the House of Representatives. So the best models have to take into account which of the two major coalitions/parties will receive preference transfers from small party candidates. Malcolm Mackerras – I met him in 2006 while working in electoral reform – developed just such a model, which is the basis for this calculator at the ABC. His “electoral pendulum” doesn’t work so well in the US, where the big challenge is controlling for incumbency, not vote transfers.

Fruits and Votes, who has numerous Australian readers, has been following the election. He reports a tightening projected margin, but Labor is projected to win the “two-party preferred” vote 52-48 over PM Howard’s Coalition.

After he was written off as a ‘has-been’, John Howard’s last week of campaigning will give the Coalition hope of pulling off a miraculous victory tomorrow.

Labor is still in front and favourite to win the 2007 election but the latest Newspoll survey is showing a late surge to the Howard Government, particularly in Queensland and Western Australia.

Newspoll’s two-party preferred figure, based on preference flows at the 2004 election, has the Labor Party in front by 52 per cent to the Coalition’s 48 per cent.

The sample size was larger than average – 2614.

Last week the two-party preferred figure was 54 for Labor and 46 per cent for the Coalition.

Yes, there’s been some tightening of the margin, and I’m a fairly new observer of Australian electoral politics, but this looks like a Labor win. By American standards, 52-48 is a big spread. In fact, that’s how well the Republicans did in 2002, just 14 months after 9/11. (That says something about what the Democrats’ 54% in 2006 meant – and what any GOP nominee faces in 2008.)