“You all have this!”
Those reassuring words came from Sean Dugar, a panelist at a recent League of Women Voters of Portland community education webinar titled, “Ranked-Choice Voting: Moving Portland Forward with Confidence.”
The League invited four national and local voting experts to share their experiences educating voters about ranked-choice voting (RCV). One of them was Kali Odell, an elections specialist with the Multnomah County Elections Division. I learned a lot from her about how Portland’s November election will unfold. For example, because we vote by mail, and because ballots postmarked as late as election day are accepted, it takes several days for all our ballots to arrive. How does that work with transferring votes and eliminating candidates? Isn’t there a chance that some candidates will be eliminated only to have a bundle of later votes boost their score? How can updated results be posted?
I learned from listening to Odell that the Elections Division will re-run the ranked-choice tabulation afresh, every day, on all ballots received to-date. In other words, they aren’t jiggering new arrivals into an old calculation, rather they recalculate from the start, and each day’s update reflects the rankings from the ballots on-hand.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What I’m hoping to do by the end of this two-part post is to convince you that Dugar is right, Portland has got this.
Today’s post covers everything up to now — our large field of candidates, single vote transfer, why Portland is using multi-member districts, and the outreach blitz. Later in the week, my second post will get more technical — exhausted ballots, “last one standing” failsafes, and why you should “go for it” with the ranking.
Portland voters are a little skittish
In District 4, at least, I think when our candidate pool surged from a manageable 18, to an overwhelming 30 candidates, people started getting nervous.
And I’ve got to admit, as bullish as I’ve been about RCV, with 30 candidates even I started to imagine scenarios in which the count might get hung up and not return three winning candidates — particularly if voters became dazzled by the sheer number of people running, or if too many voters did not rank enough candidates to arrive at three winners.
So I set out this week to reassure myself and ended up with this post, a Voter Care Package which hopefully has something to reassure everyone.
Where are we: a recap
If you haven’t been paying close attention this past few years, here are two videos which will bring you up to speed about our new voting format in roughly 11 minutes. Even if you are already up-to-speed and know all about RCV in multi-member districts, watch them anyway, they are entertaining, funny and excellent.
The Oregonian explains single transferable vote using doughnuts. As my friend said to me, “I didn’t understand anything until watching this!” (4 minutes, 53 seconds to enlightenment.)
And if you are wondering why it is we need this newfangled system, (4 districts, 3 members each, council of 12; or 4-3-12) Mont Chris Hubbard tells you why in this classic video he made a couple of years ago (using M&Ms).
If you want to know more, maybe from an official source, check out the Multnomah County RCV website. They’ve got practice ballots and other materials. After all that, you will know more than you need to for voting.
But if the sweets are still leaving you hungry, and you are comfortable with statistics, lets go for the meat.
You prefer meat to sweets
The Mathematical Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG) of Tufts University is a nationally-acclaimed voting research group. They analyzed Portland demographics and modeled several voting and representation schemes to arrive at this 4-3-12 system, and concluded that this method has the best chance of offering the greatest number of Portlanders a voice. It was the MGGG work which informed the Charter Commission’s decision to use ranked-choice voting in multi-member districts (a form of proportional voting).
To better understand what this system means for Portlanders (without having to slog through all the statistics) turn to Kristin Eberhard, writing for The Sightline Institute: Want to Give Portlanders of Color a Voice on City Council? Districts Won’t Help.
Eberhard makes a point about minority representation that is lost on most people writing about our election:
The modeling was about people of color, but the results apply to Portlanders who are in the minority for any number of reasons: small business owners, people who are dependent on transit, those who get around by bike, youth, or parents of school-age children. Most groups don’t all live in just one part of the city, so districts might not help them have a voice, but proportional voting would.
Charter Commission members and advocates who care about better representation on city council—whether for Portlanders of color, or for any other class of under-represented Portlanders—would do well to look to multi-winner races and proportional voting, not single-winner districts.
OK, I get it, but what about everybody else?
Starting now, we are about to be on the receiving end of the biggest outreach blitz we have ever experienced, and that’s saying something in Portland. Voter education is considered part of the RCV implementation process. As I write, in fact, I just received the September newsletter from the City of Portland Transition Team, full of news and seven upcoming events.
And have you noticed the RCV ads that are appearing on BikePortland? Yep, they’re coming for you on your favorite news site (maybe this post even has one). Grace Ramsey, of Democracy Rising, told the LWV audience that,
We want to make sure everyone is coming along, and knows what is going to happen on their ballot. The goal that we have collectively is [that] as few people as possible are surprised on election day to see that ranked choice ballot.
She talked about media, radio, door-knocking, and said they are thinking creatively about “how we can reach people where they are.”
Conclusion
That’s enough for now. You should now know how to fill out your ballot, why we are using proportional RCV, and some of the statistics supporting Portland’s choice of this system. Later this week I’ll do a Part II to this post where I get more technical.
Thanks for reading.
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How are they going to process the small part of PDX in Clackamas County and the small part in Washington County?
You know Jakob, I’ve got an old programmer’s habit of sorting problems into “solvable” or “problematic.” The city oozing into other counties falls into the “solvable” category, so I assume someone has competently dealt with it. Now, if I lived in one of those areas, I’d probably want to know more, as it is, I’m not sweating it. Too easy to lose the forest for the trees.
This is a perfectly good answer, but aren’t you just a bit curious?
People who live outside of cities get many benefit and fewer costs, relatively speaking, to those that live in the city.
this includes Portland roads, possibly water, possibly sewer, etc. Their is certainly a relationship that manages this, but I imagine if they live in a different county, they might not vote in a city election, or maybe they get to vote for Mayor/Council in Portland and also for Clackamas county commissioners while we vote for Multnomah county commissioners…
I suppose one could look here:
https://www.portland.gov/elections/elections-faq/general-voting-questions
or here:
https://www.clackamas.us/taxonomy/term/361
Don’t get me started on people that live in Vancouver, WA and come to Portland to work and shop and recreate…
What am I missing in this question? Everyone should get a ballot applicable to their particular address, just like always, right?
I don’t see how county of residence would matter.
The district maps show that a small portion of District 1 is in Clackamas County, and small parts of District 4 are in Clackamas and Washington counties.
I assume nothing is different for those people. They used to vote for city commissioners, they still do.
My old neighborhood was annexed by Portland back in the 1980s. I wonder if anyone living there wishes they could “un-annex” now?
Lisa, you did a great job on this!
Thanks for this. But that is a lot to take in. Voting shouldn’t be this difficult.
It shouldn’t require long form articles and webinars to explain how this all works.
Also if I am voting for my favorite candidate it worries me that I may be unintentionally helping my 4th or 5th pick win at the end of the day.
Honestly, I don’t think it really is as difficult as this makes it seem. Lisa likes to get wonky with it, and I appreciate that. But in practice if voters have heard of any of the candidates and of those people they have heard of, choose their favorites, the system should work. Even in the best case from before this new system, if there were three or four candidates, I have serious doubts that anybody actually knew anything about more than one or two of them. That’s one reason incumbents usually have an advantage. People may say “yeah but it’s easier to know about four candidates than 30”. True, but who honestly did? Who did any research into all the candidates for city council before (population wide I mean – not you, I know you’re different)?
Now, is that a good thing? I don’t think so – I wish people knew more about what they were choosing. But they just don’t, and I don’t think this makes it any worse. And I think the new way has some definite benefits.
But, the main point I’m trying to make, is I don’t think it is that difficult. You do not have to research all 30 candidates, you choose as many or as few as you know about and like. You maybe delve into more details about the few you know about to decide the order to rank them. I think all these edge cases people fear aren’t real enough to really make a difference in practice.
The one concern I do have about the new system is if there is a bias to reading a bit about the first two or three options on the ballot and choosing one of those, or just choosing the top N on the list. That could be bad, giving a huge advantage to last names that sort higher or whatever arbitrary sort order they use. They could solve that easily by randomizing the order on each ballot, but I don’t know if they have.
Before you had to know enough to pick one of two (in the general election, when most people vote). Now you need to
chooserank 6 from a list of 30.You can downplay it all you want, but that’s not just a variation on a theme — it’s fundamentally different and hugely more difficult (even if you have a list that someone else has prepared for you, which I think many people will).
“Hugely more difficult.”
That was the argument Mapps and Gonzalez made when they tried to gut the new system despite the fact voters clearly wanted it. It was paternalistic and arrogant and an insult to the intelligence of the electorate.
Define the increased difficulty in terms of extra minutes/hours and reading needed to fill out a ballot this time.
I’m calling hyperbole.
“A properly functioning democracy depends on a well-informed electorate.”
Thomas Jefferson
You still had the primary election before, which if you decided not to vote in, you were effectively choosing from a list that someone else prepared for you in the general.
The previous system was just as garbage if you skipped the primary, and not any different if you didn’t skip the primary. If you skipped the primary you were just saying “let whatever special interests and money that are out there present me with a false dichotomy so I can pretend voting is easier”.
I deliberately wrote the article from easy to hard. You can stop reading at the Oregonian doughnut video and know more than is needed for voting. In fact, the first graphic of the sample ballot is probably all you need.
You’re not required to rank anyone who you don’t want to “help win”. If you don’t have a 4th or 5th pick, then just pick your top 3 and leave it at that.
The complex explanation is mostly to address (very valid and healthy) questions about ways it could theoretically break, but the actual process is super simple:
When it comes time to vote, that’s all there is to it.
Jay Cee, one set of facts which were mentioned in the webinar is that 85% of RCV voters found voting that way understandable, and 99.9% of voters cast a valid ballot. I don’t remember which city those stats came from, but RCV has been studied to death. There are a lot of empirical studies.
If you think 1,000 words is long-form, I’ve got some old Harpers and New Yorkers for you 🙂
Lisa,
You seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid. I’m curious if you and others will be quite so bullish in a few years., especially on the multimember RCV with STV that we’re using for City Council elections. We have had a lot of failed local and state government experiments recently. My prediction is that this new voting scheme will be another.
Oh, by all means let’s keep the perfectly functional system we currently have.
Do you actually live in Portland?
Damn, give me credit for doing my tiny part in making the Kool-Aid! Everything about the charter reform process has been open, transparent and public. There was nothing top-down or imposed-on-the-public about it. In fact, Mapps and Dan Ryan did all they could to stop it.
So Lisa, correct me if I’m wrong (and I’m using what I’ve learned from elections in the Republic of Ireland which uses more or less the exact same system).
First, to get to the 25%+1 threshold, all the ballots need to come in already, and given Oregon’s vote-by-mail system, this could take up to two weeks after November 5th? Presumably the city will have an exact number of registered voters in each district (and an estimate of possible provisional ballots of not-yet-registered new voters), so given the usual turn-out of say 60%, they can at least guesstimate what that 25%+1 figure is likely to be close to even within a few days, but might it still may be after November 12th before we get any results?
Second, depending on how each district has historically voted (e.g., East Portland is historically more conservative, inner SE more liberal), and given the large pools of candidates in each district (19 to 30), how soon will we see candidates openly declaring themselves associated with partisan political groups and/or associations, or vying for particular endorsements (Street Trust, PBA, Teacher’s Union)? (I note in the Irish elections, right-wing voters vote for certain lists of similar parties or independent candidates, similarly to those on the far left, and those in the center 2 parties vote for each other’s candidates as 3rd or 4th ranked votes.)
Third, what role, if any, will the 95 registered neighborhood associations play in the new districts and the elections? (Note: District 1 is the entirety of the 13 East Portland NAs in EPCO/EPAP plus Sumner in Cully.)
This systems seems overly complex and I still don’t think many people (including many who profress they do) undertand how the votes will be counted in the multimember council races. My understanding is that this multimemeber RCV system is not used anywhere else in the USA.Regardless, it seems very opaque and it’s pretty clear most voters won’t understand how their vote is counted (or not). I don’t think this is a postive despite the efforts by many to cast it as an improvement. Time will tell at this point.
Minneapolis uses it.