Portland, Do You Know What You Did with Rank Voting?

By William MacKenzie,

All you Portland voters. Remember how you voted 58.1% to 41.9% on Measure 26-228 to switch to a ranked choice voting (RCV) system for the Portland City Council?

“In the end, we saw monumental wins that will change the landscape of our local democracy and advance opportunity for communities of color,” enthused the Coalition of Communities of Color after the vote.

“Portlanders made history by demanding a government that is effective, accountable and representative,” said Debra Porta, co-chair of the Charter Commission, which initially recommended voters consider the sweeping changes .

“The passage of Measure 26-228 is an historic step towards a democracy that truly gives all Portlanders a seat at the decision making table and a government that meets their basic needs,” said Sol Mora of the group Portland United for Change, which advocated for the measure. “This victory was powered by the people for the people.”

Well, supporters got what they wanted. But while Measure 26-228 required mote than 50% yes votes in Portland to pass, the 12 new city councilors elected under the the quirky new system didn’t need 50% to win in the 4 new districts.

This is how the RCV reform proposal described the system:

“If no candidate receives a majority of the vote in the initial round, subsequent rounds are counted in which (i) candidates retain the number of votes counted for them in the first and any subsequent rounds that already occurred; and (ii) the candidates having the fewest votes are successively eliminated in rounds and their votes are counted as votes for the candidates who are ranked next on the ballots that had been counted for the eliminated candidates. The process of eliminating candidates and transferring their votes to the next-ranked candidate on ballots repeats until a candidate has a majority of the vote.”

The Councilors of each district were elected using a proportional method of RCV known as “single transferable vote” (STV). In this system, voters rank the candidates and if a candidate gets more votes than needed to be elected the extra, or surplus, votes get transferred to the voter’s next choices. The charter reform proposal was so convoluted it took almost 300 words to explain how it would work (See below for complete text).

Under this system, a candidate running for a seat in a multimember district could win a position on the Council with as little as 25% of the vote, or maybe even less.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Eleven of the twelve Councilors were elected with 25% of the vote in their district. One newly-elected Councilor, Jamie Dunphy in East Portland’s District 1, was even elected with just 22.8% of the vote.

District 1’s three final winners were Candace Avalos, Loretta Smith and Dunphy. In the 1st round, Avalos was the first choice of just 19.4% of the vote, Smith was the first choice of 13.1% and Dunphy was the first choice of 11.9%.

One consequence of all this is that the newly elected Councilors may be able to remain in office by consistently satisfying just that small segment of eligible voters and ignoring those who are disenchanted with their performance because it would require 75% of voters to vote against the entrenched councilor to remove him or her.

As Tim Nesbit, a former chief of staff to former Democratic Governor Ted Kulongoski and a critic of the ballot measure before its passage, wrote in the Portland Tribune, “This will be a ‘welcome to the Hotel California’ for candidates who seek office in the first council election to follow. It will be easy to check in to the council, but much harder to be forced to leave.”

Charter reform’s explanation of how “single transferable vote” (STV) would work:

“Councilors of each district are elected using a proportional method of ranked choice voting known as single transferable vote. This method provides for the candidates to be elected on the basis of a threshold. The threshold is determined by the number of seats to be filled plus one, so that the threshold is the lowest number of votes a candidate must receive to win a seat such that no more candidates can win election than there are seats to be filled. In the initial round, the number of first rankings received by each candidate is the candidate’s vote count. Candidates whose vote counts are at least the threshold are declared elected. Votes that counted for elected candidates in excess of the threshold are called surplus. If fewer candidates are elected in the initial round than there are seats to be filled, the surplus percentage of all votes for the candidates who received a surplus are transferred to the next-highest ranked candidates in proportion to the total numbers of next-highest rankings they received on the ballots that counted for the elected candidate. If, after all surpluses have been counted in a round, no additional candidates have a vote count that is at least the threshold, the candidates with the lowest vote counts are successively eliminated in rounds and their votes are counted as votes for the candidates who are ranked next highest on the ballots that had been counted for the eliminated candidates, until another candidate has a vote count that is at least the threshold or until the number of candidates remaining equals the number of seats that have not yet been filled. The process of transferring surpluses of elected candidates and eliminating candidates continues until all positions are elected.”