Are there other vote distributions and incomplete ballot scenarios that might derail arriving at three winners?
This is a continuation of last week’s post about Portland’s upcoming election using a new way of electing city leaders: ranked-choice voting for three representatives each, in four new geographic districts, or what is sometimes called proportional ranked-choice voting (RCV).
As I warned, this will be the more technical of the two posts. If all you want to know is how to correctly fill out your ballot, you don’t need to read this. However, I regularly come across Portlanders who have a tech or analytics background, and who want more information than just basic instructions. And many other people are curious for a deeper understanding about how all this works. This post is for them. It’s a long post for BikePortland, but each section can stand alone. I view the whole thing as a resource for the curious.
In preparing the post, I spoke or exchanged emails with four people: James Eccles, Voter Education Lead from the Portland Elections Office; Deb Otis, the Director of Policy and Research from Fairvote; my friend Dan, who has a PhD in Computational Neuroscience; and Chris Donnay, a Mathematics PhD candidate from Ohio State who will soon be starting as a lab manager at the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG). I decided not to summarize the written responses from the experts, it’s all there for you to evaluate, straight from the horse’s mouth.
At the very end of the post, I apply what I’ve learned to the Mayor’s race. Ready? Let’s go…
My question
One can easily construct artificial scenarios which have a close to zero probability of happening, but which theoretically might confound the RCV algorithm. For example, say 100,000 District 4 voters each rank only one candidate, and their choices are evenly distributed among the 30 candidates. All the candidates would pretty much receive the same number of votes, there would be no vote transferring, and also no clear winners. Obviously, that’s a possibility in the abstract, but also unlikely to happen in the real world. But are there other, more probable, vote distributions and incomplete ballot scenarios that might derail arriving at three winners?
My question to the experts ended up being some version of,
“Do you know of anyone who has modeled the probabilities of the vote not producing three (25% + 1) winners? One could imagine this happening if a significant number of voters didn’t fully rank 6 candidates, and if the vote totals were somewhat evenly distributed.”
Here’s how they responded:
Portland Elections Office
My first query was to the Portland Elections Office, and I received a nice long reply from City of Portland Elections Analyst and Voter Education Lead James Eccles:
One thing I will note is that our Elections Code is written such that we will always elect three winners as long as there are at least three candidates in the contest. We will continue with tabulation until either three candidates have passed the 25%+1 threshold or all but three candidates have been eliminated.
I do not know the exact mathematical probability of this happening, but our research has shown that it is a rare event. At some point it would become mathematically impossible, but even with voters averaging just over 3 rankings per ballot it is very unlikely.
Fairvote compiles all available cast vote records for US RCV elections and has authored some studies based on this data. A couple of important highlights from those studies include that “A median of 68% of voters rank multiple candidates” and that in elections with 5+ candidates that number rises to 74%.
A little further down that page referencing the same studies, they discuss the impact of inactive, or exhausted, ballots on the outcome of RCV elections. If a ballot reaches the point where it no longer has any rankings for active candidates, we consider it an exhausted ballot. They note that in a data set that includes 300 elections between 2004 and 2022 that although voluntary abstention (what we are talking about here) is the highest cause of exhausted ballots, it is still only occurring 7.8% of the time in multi-round elections. If the numbers in Portland follow this trend, our number of exhausted ballots would not be high enough to cause the outcome we are discussing. (They also make an important point here that in typical single-choice elections that result in a runoff election, the rate of voter participation greatly declines between the first and second election. Far more than we are likely to see in drop-off between the first and last round of tabulation in our elections.)
When we were first writing the election code for RCV in 2023, we also asked the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center and Fairvote to conduct some additional analysis on our behalf related to how the number of rankings available might impact how many rankings a voter used. In the summary of those findings, they found that:
- “Ballots that allow more rankings tend to invite voters to rank more candidates.”
- “In races with 3 winners, voters tend to use 2-3 rankings. However, the races with three winners are also the ones that have rank limits. So, in races that attract a similar number of candidates but allow more rankings voters tend to rank 3-5 candidates.”
These were both factors in our decision to have six rankings in Portland elections.
Fairvote
Fairvote is a nonpartisan national organization which promotes ranked-choice voting (RCV) and proportional RCV, and which advises cities and states across the country. Fairvote’s Director of Policy and Research Deb Otis responded to me via email (emphases hers):
I don’t know of any modeling on the likelihood of any winners finishing below the 25% threshold, but we do know that it’s possible. If that happens, the candidate who is the “last one standing” closest to the threshold will be elected. From my perspective, that’s not really a problem. The nice thing about proportional RCV is that the vast majority of ballots will count towards at least one winner, even if they become exhausted before the count is complete. So even with a crowded field and a six-rank limit, most ballots will be impactful and most voters will have someone they ranked earn a seat.
For reference, the average number of ranks used in the Cambridge MA city council and school board races in 2023 was 7.3 and 4.6 ranks, respectively. 85% of people ranked one of the top 3 winners.
So I’ll bet some modeling on likelihood is possible, but I also don’t see that as the marker of whether RCV was successful at giving more voters a voice and giving more groups a seat at the table. So even with a crowded field and a six-rank limit, most ballots will be impactful and most voters will have someone they ranked earn a seat.
My friend Dan
Dan got his PhD in Computational Neuroscience, and now works analyzing big data sets using statistical tools. He mentioned to me when we talked that he had once taught a college-level math class which had a unit in voting schemes. He started our conversation by saying, “No voting method is perfect.” What can trip voters up with RCV is that the “winner” might not be the first choice of a plurality of voters. Second-ranks can pull a candidate who didn’t have the most first-rank votes over the 25%, or 50% threshold. This might not seem fair to some voters.
“What can trip voters up is that the “winner” might not be the first choice of a plurality of voters. This might not seem fair.”
— Dan, my (very smart) friend
To be honest, I had contacted Dan hoping to coax him into doing some quick-and-dirty data modeling, but he put that notion to rest in short order, saying that without a way of limiting the inputs, the possibilities became “astronomical” and not possible to analyze.
Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group
The last person I spoke with was Chris Donnay, a mathematics PhD candidate who will soon begin working with MGGG. (MGGG is the group which advised the Charter Reform Committee on the different voting schemes and district configurations that would give the most Portlanders an electoral voice.) Chris told me, “I’ve never seen Single Transferable Vote (STV) not produce the target number of winners, with either real or synthetic data sets.” He agreed with my friend Dan that this is a difficult modeling problem, and that it can become a “combinatorial explosion,” but that MGGG had empirical data which allowed them to limit the parameters, and that, yes, the group had done a partial model.
Chris was confident that the Portland elections would work, but added that there are often “some surprises” the first time a city or state uses RCV. He mentioned the same issue that Dan did, that sometimes the candidate who receives the most first-rank votes doesn’t end up being the winner.
What all this might mean for the Mayor’s race
I could see the issue that both Dan and Chris mentioned, of the candidate receiving the plurality of first-rank votes not becoming the “winner,” happening in the race for mayor.
Let’s assume that Commissioner Rene Gonzalez is the front-runner. It’s not a stretch to imagine Gonzalez garnering most of the 1st-rank votes, say 38%. And perhaps Carmen Rubio coming in a close 2nd, with 35% of the 1st-rank vote.
But there also seems to be a sizeable “anyone but Rene” contingent. If it goes into a second round of tabulation, and more voters who ranked Keith Wilson or Mingus Mapps as their first choice, go on to rank Rubio, rather than Gonzalez, as their second choice, possibly Rubio could cross the 50%+1 threshold with more votes (1st-rank + 2nd-round transfer votes) than Gonzalez receives. That would make Rubio the winner despite Gonzalez receiving more 1st-rank votes. And I could see that being controversial among people new to this system.
Get ready to rank!
Thanks for reading.
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There is a lot of hand wringing about “too many candidates” in the press and amongst commenters and political consultants who made a living on the previous system. It is important to keep in mind that in this election we are electing an entirely new City Council. That is part of the reason we have so many candidates and it won’t be repeated. Moreover it is commonplace for new voting systems like RCV to initially attract a lot of new candidates. After a cycle or two the number of candidate filings tends to decrease. Lastly having more Portlanders out there selling their ideas and learning how to build and run political campaigns can only be good. It is helping build and enlist the tremendous amount of talent and expertise that has been left on the sidelines under our existing form of government.
Journalists often don’t like the chaos of democratic politics. It is partly understandable because they have the job of making sense of it all. But unfortunately sometimes that makes them biased in favor of making it less messy which often means less participatory and representative. So I say relax and don’t stress it if democracy looks a little the messy and chaotic, it is often evidence that it is more authentic.
BTW. BIkeportland is doing a great job with few resources covering the candidates and the election. Readers should support this.
I feel like it only seems controversial to people who either haven’t thought about it for more than 15 seconds, or people who just want their person to win and they can think of a way to say they should have won. They’re trying to contrive a reason (in this scenario) Gonzalez should have won.
RCV, even with whatever imagined / hypothetical flaws this new system may have, will give better results. There is no reason to think the minority of voters who voted for candidate A should get their way over a majority who voted for “not A”. That would be unfair, and it’s the tyranny you get with first past the post nonsense.
The main threat that I see is that the voters do not think the winner won “fairly”. The system is somewhat opaque to the casual observer, and we all know people who are resistant to the facts.
As I point out in other posts, you can also get that with ranked choice voting. There is a danger in believing your own propaganda. Its simply false to claim that ranked choice voting eliminates the need for strategic voting or even guarantees the most popular candidate will win.
Thank you for this comment, John V. The word count on my post was getting a little high, so I probably didn’t express clearly enough that neither Dan nor Chris (nor myself) consider the 1st-rank plurality issue to be a problem. James Eccles, from City Elections sent this to me earlier today:
And from downthread with the Sarah Palin/Alaska comment, that is exactly how RCV is supposed to work.
It’s worth correcting that RCV does not remove the spoiler effect – it reduces (this is good) and obscures (this is less good) it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect
“85% of people ranked one of the top 3 winners.”
15% of votes being wasted (not counted) does not seem like a good outcome at all.
If the Charter commission had not decided, at the very last minute, to ignore the voting system choice of their own subcommittee there would be no possibility of exhausted votes:
https://www.starvoting.org/wasted_votes
*had decided, at the
I don’t understand your “wasted,” “not counted” framing. It seems to me that it means that 15% of the voters didn’t rank a candidate who ended up winning. Isn’t that a much better outcome than, say, 49.9% of the voters being unhappy with the outcome? Or as you out it, having their vote “wasted” and “not counted.”
I used a term that is commonly used as synonyms for “exhausted votes”.
For example even Fair Vote describes RCV exhausted votes as wasted votes:
https://fairvote.org/the-wasted-votes-wheel/
PS: I dislike first-past-the-post wasted votes too so don’t at me about the quote
.
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‘“not counted” framing’
Once again this framing is commonly used “framing”.
https://www.starvoting.org/wasted_votes
The votes are “not counted” in the deciding vote which has always been a flaw in PR RCV and has been the cause of many voting pathologies. For example, RCV will likely be repealed in Alaska this November due to the candidate who was most broadly acceptable in the vote count not winning (a Condorcet failure).
Seems like they should tweak it rather than fully repeal it.
I don’t think you should even have this discussion without mentioning the Alaska congressional races. The one candidate that had the support of the majority of voters didn’t win. That was because a lot of the third place candidates didn’t vote for the other candidates, but most of the second place candidates voters did vote for the third place candidate giving him votes from an overall majority.
The result was that a heavily partisan district elected a candidate that the majority rejected. She was simply rejected by fewer voters than the second place candidate. By contrast the third place candidate had the support of a majority, but was the first choice of fewer than the first two candidates and therefore eliminated.
I would not trust any of the groups that are proponents of ranked choice voting to provide objective evaluations. The danger is that 25% of people only rank people who are not among the final four. That guarantees someone will be elected with less than 25% of the vote.
When you have 30 candidates for three seats, that seems like a fairly easy thing to have happen. The only real question is how many truly competitive candidates there are to share the vote. By competitive, I mean someone who might get one of six rankings from 25% of the voters in their district.
The other, larger issue, is how the council will function when to get reelected someone only needs to keep the votes of 6.25% of the voters from one part of the city. They don’t need to worry at all about what the other 93.75% of the voters in Portland think.
Its going to be a wild ride and I think anyone who believes they know how this will really work is fooling themselves. And the folks who are claiming they do know are fooling everybody.
Thanks for bringing up the Alaska example
FUBAR is the word that comes to mind when thinking about this new system.
The only people that seem to be excited for this new system are voters who think there is now a real possibility that their far out wacky candidate, that wouldn’t win the popular vote in a million years, now has a chance to win, and that should worry everyone.
The only reason a “far out wacky candidate” might actually have a chance to win in the new system is because in reality they weren’t far out or wacky, people were just afraid to vote for them because they thought they might not win. Now they can vote for who they want to win instead of who polls or the Oregonian tells them is going to win. It’s unambiguously better. Maybe some other forms of RCV are better in unlikely edge cases, but the worst system is first past the post.
That is just not true and is probably the most dangerous fallacy of the RCV advocates. All you need to do is look at the Alaska vote. People voted for the “far out wacky” Republican Palin and ranked the alternative Republican Begich second. Since Palin finished ahead of Begich all the people who voted for Palin first and Begich second ended up represented by a Democrat elected with a minority of the votes. If they had ranked them in the other order, Begich would have won with a majority of the vote.
And so cometh the 2024 initiative to rid Alaska of the scourge of RCV.
If the RCV election results really does reflect “the will of the people”, and the system is “unambiguously better”, this repeal should go down in flames.
You are re-writing Alaska’s election. From NBC news in 2022–(via Google):
Obviously Palin did not have the support of the majority of voters.
RCV working as designed.
No it did not.
The Alaska election violated the most fundamental rule of election fairness (Condorcet) and also showed how RCV can result in a very large percentage of votes being wasted. It was a fustercluck and RCV will likely be repealed in Alaska as a result of this failed election.
I would not use the term “majority” but it was clear that right-wing wacko was the preferred candidate of most voters.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.00108
It’s a good paper, thank you for citing it. I don’t know the details of how Portland has implemented eliminating candidates. But all the voter information will be available in a data structure, and they are re-tabulating the vote every day, with the total votes received to-date.
It seems obvious to me that in the multiple-winner elections, the transfer of votes which will be most significant will be the over-flow votes from a strong winner. For example, let’s say a top-ranked candidate wins with 41% of the total 1st-rank vote. That leaves 16% of the total first-round votes to be redistributed down, making the 2nd-ranks of those 41% winning voters very important.
The elimination and redistributing up of the candidates with the least votes will most probably be insignificant.
Kudos on the Condorcet reference, can I mention John Rawls?
My politics has strong affinity with his theory of justice, so please mention Rawls more.
If I were the programmer writing this up, I wouldn’t eliminate a candidate who still had a possible path to victory through the entirety of the rankings in the voter table. Does that make my code a STAR implementation? Seriously asking.
I mean, some folks clearly won’t be receiving enough votes in the total table to be viable. They can be culled immediately.
STAR voting scores all candidates from 0 to 5 stars and there are only two rounds (scoring, runoff) and everyone who voted has their vote counted.
I’m convinced that we should use STAR voting. It has been my opinion from early on that the new system we’re about to try isn’t the best, just that it’s better than what we had. Why we didn’t go for something that works better, that is hard to understand. But I wasn’t about to vote against the new system and lose all the things I like about it.
Is it not possible now to revise the system again to switch to STAR? It seems like it would be a much simpler transition. Voters still do pretty much the same thing.
My expectation is that none of the edge cases are going to come up in this election. It’ll seem like it works well most likely. I wonder if people will be uninterested in changing it again if it appears to work.
For some reason your comment got me thinking about other wacky but plausible RCV outcomes.
Candidates A and B are on the far left and far right, and a polarized electorate gives each of them 40% of the first place votes. Candidate C is in the middle, but being a nonpolarizing figure, only attracts 20% of the first place votes.
In this scenario, the election will be decided by the second choice of supporters of Candidates C.
However, if voters for A and B all rank Candidate C as their second choice, the “best” outcome is probably Candidate C, who everyone agrees is acceptable even if not their top pick. Instead, we have essentially an arbitrary decision between the two extreme candidates, a situation in which half of the electorate is going to be bitterly unhappy with the winner of the election.
This scenario is not an argument in favor of conventional elections, but it is an argument against RCV.
I just learned something interesting about an hour ago, I haven’t fact-checked it, but I’ll toss it out there. Apparently Palin told her voters not to rank anyone else. Voters for other Republican were so ticked off, they reciprocated and refused to rank Palin. That’s how she lost.
As far as your example, I see what you’re saying, I understand the criticism, but it doesn’t disqualify the method for me. It’s OK with me that first and second ranks aren’t treated interchangeably at that decision point. And in real life it would rarely be so neat, or symmetrical.
I think our real life situation of Wilson, Rubio and Gonzalez is much more exciting, with Mapps voters being a wildcard for me.
I think you should have fact checked that BEFORE you put it out there. There is zero evidence to support the idea .
The claim seems to be that all the Begich voters who didn’t rank Palin refused to rank her because she had encouraged her supporters not to rank Begich. But enough of her supporters did rank Begich for him to have the support of the majority of voters.
Did Palin tell her voters not to rank anyone below her?
I am doubtful that with 30 candidates anyone is going to get 41% of the top ranked votes. I think 10% is more likely. But it will be interesting to see how it really works.
I’m enjoying the discussion, Ross. When I use numbers it’s usually just to come up with a simple illustration for a point I’m making, not because I think they are realistic.
One thing I learned at the League of Women Voters event is that there will be analytics available for the public to query the election results. So how it plays out will be transparent. I can’t wait to see.
With the STAR versus STV discussion, I think one aspect which is not getting mentioned is that there is much empirical data for how people behave when voting. Political scientists have entire careers researching that stuff.
But we are discussing this in the abstract as if every voter were an independent widget, not influenced at all by others, and that is far from the case. That’s real clear if you look at the small donor data (even though they are way behind with the data entry). Every district has a candidate far ahead of the others in fundraising. I can’t help but believe that will win them more than 10% of the vote (except in D3, where I’m not sure how Steve Novick’s greater name recognition will compete against scores of tiny contributions gained from social media and email lists).
I have to admit I am fascinated by this.
I would point out that candidates small donations can come from anywhere in the city. They do not necessarily reflect support in a particular district. In fact, they likely don’t. They probably reflect organized city wide support from interest groups.
It will be interesting to see how candidates who are well known citywide fare in local district elections. Its possible they will be king makers whose second place votes play a major role in determining the other winners. Its also possible that they will be shut out by candidates who focus on a narrower band of local voters.
I really expect at least one MAGA candidate to win. As I pointed out elsewhere you only need 6.25% of the citywide vote to win. But I haven’t looked at the Trump vote in 2020 to know if they are concentrated enough in one district.
No, but Begich did.
Spell this out for me like I’m a 6th grader. How did the candidate with 27.8% of the vote in the first round have majority support?
I don’t really care about the content of this discussion, but it is telling that even interested and knowledgeable folks get tripped up over the lingo and ramifications of the numbers, so explaining to someone who is confused and somewhat skeptical why their favored candidate lost and convincing them there were no shenanigans when votes from their candidate were given to one they don’t like is going to be our new springtime hobby.
Its pretty simple. Almost all the people who voted for Palen ranked Begich as their second choice. Together that was a majority of the voters. Neither of the other two candidates had a majority. And its important to know this happened twice. First in the special election and then again in the November election.
Personally, I love the outcome. But it is not representative of the voters.
That doesn’t seem simple to me at all. What’s the generalized method by which you would have had Begich selected as the winner?
There’s probably not a good answer to that question, but it does seem ironic that had Palin won fewer first pace votes, as I understand it, the Republican would have won rather than the Democrat. So it was the strength of a far-right candidate that led to the election of the leftmost candidate in the race.
Surely there’s something perverse about that. I don’t know if there is (or even should be) a fix, but I can see why people might conclude the system wasn’t producing a logical outcome.
“Logical” is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Given Peltola had 39.7% of the vote *and* a significant number of Begich voters placed Palin 3rd or not at all in their ranking, it seems to this beholder that the system worked as designed.
If by “logical”, you mean it’s different from the way it’s worked up to now, I agree with you, it didn’t produce that outcome. But if RCV never produces outcomes different (but highly defensible ones) from the currently conventional approach to tallying votes, what would be the point of having it?
I think for this sort if issue, it is. The question before Alaskans is did their system produce the result they wanted? (Which is a different question than if it worked as designed.)
Credibility in elections is hugely important. If Alaskans don’t feel they got that, their repeal of RCV is going to pass. I have no sense how folks are going to vote on that, but as we wade into our own complex and novel voting system, it will be interesting to see what happens.
I also heard, but haven’t fact-checked, that Alaskans are very happy with Peltola. Palin shot herself in the foot by not courting Begich voters.
STV penalizes acting like a jerk and alienating voters aligned with other candidates. Relatively positive campaigns are the result (which you can already see in the Portland city council races. Candidates tend not to criticize one another.)
It seems like Palin wasn’t on the ball enough to figure that out.
The ‘normal’ system featured the same kind of effects all the time (2000 and 2016 POTUS elections were both won by inept Republicans because of Green party votes). All the complaining discounts the Begich voters who ranked Peltola 2nd. They clearly understood the implications of their votes, because the did it twice as noted. If the Palin voters really wanted to Republican, they should have voted Begich/Palin instead of the other way around.
Yes, that’s true. I believe RCV is a better system than our current one, but I haven’t really had to sit with the results yet. I also believe that when a voting system produces unexpected or counterintuitive results, public confidence can be undermined (which we’ve also seen when someone wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote).
Your comment about what Palin voters should have done is exactly the kind of strategic voting RCV is supposed to make unnecessary. And while I follow the math, intuitively, it feels as if Begich voters second ranked votes were valued more highly than those of others, and that seems a bit weird.
The bottom line is that if Alaska voters like RCV, they’ll keep it.
Of course the advocates of RCV have consistently claimed that isn’t the case. That you can vote for your first choice without having to consider their electability. And you can see that same claim being repeated in Portland now.
If you don’t rank one of the top 4 candidates in your district your rankings won’t have any effect on the outcome. So you have to consider whether your candidate will be in the top four. If not, you are wasting your vote. And in the mayor’s race your candidate needs to be in the top 2. Of course how you rank people helps determine who is in the top 4 and top 2. So the connection between how you rank people and the outcome is really clear … NOT.
I can’t speak for RCV advocates (I think it’s better than what it replaced in Alaska, but I’m no ‘advocate’). Nevertheless, ranking Palin second would still be ‘voting’ for her.
You get to rank 6 candidates, so you have 6 chances to ‘have any effect.’ But I’m not sure I follow your logic. Why does a ballot that ranks the loser of the last round count more than one that only ranks losers of previous rounds? It’s more sensible to have the position that your vote doesn’t count unless you rank the winner. If you happen to rank the 2nd place candidate and not the winner, your vote didn’t really ‘have any effect’ in the sense that your fellow citizens elected somebody you didn’t vote for.
Its not an illogical outcome. But it is the outcome that the advocates of Ranked Choice Voting have consistently suggest wasn’t possible. Assuming the Republicans all voted the same way in a primary and general election, the outcome would have been the same. The question is were the Republicans who failed to rank Palin clear that it was the same as not voting in the general election. My guess is many didn’t clearly understand that.
There isn’t a fix. Its a natural outcome of ranked choice voting. If you don’t rank one of the last two candidates standing, your vote doesn’t count. And if the highest candidate you vote for is one of the last two standing, your other choices don’t count.
You should make clear whether you are talking about the multi-member district city council races, or the single-winner Mayoral and Auditor races. Everybody has one of their ranks count toward a candidate, that candidate might not win. Saying it means your vote wasn’t counted is misleading.
It took me a minute, but I think I understand what Ross is saying, and I think I may agree.
In a conventional general election, you have two candidates, and while you may end up voting for the losing candidate, your vote definitely counts (unless you write in Donald Duck, in which case your vote is wasted).
In the new mayoral election, there is a process of elimination where less popular candidates are removed from the pool one by one until only two are left standing (in practice the process will be stopped before this if the outcome becomes mathematically inevitable, but in principle this is how it works out}. If you have not voted for one of those two final candidates, it is the same as not having voted at all. Your vote does not help determine the winner of the election, and in effect does not count (which has the same effect as voting for Donald Duck above).
The same holds true in the districts, except you need to rank one of the top four for your vote to be meaningful.
But most people do rank one of the top candidates — that’s what makes them a top candidate!
I know who the front runners are in the mayoral election. I don’t even have an inkling who they are in District 3.
D3 is complicated. Look at Portland’s Small Donor Elections portal (linked to in my Slicing through the candidate crowd post — you do read me, don’t you?). It tells you how the fundraising is going. It’s pretty informative, lotta info there.
I do read your articles, and even when I disagree I think they are of generally high quality. As I said before, I’m a little skeptical about using fundraising data to gauge public support.
One curious thing is there are very few D3 yard signs around here. That tells me the public (at least in my neck of the woods) has not coalesced around a few likely winners. That may change, but it is unusual for late September.
Quick follow-up: I walked around for a little over an hour last night and saw a single sign for Gonzalez (in front of a house that always has a sign), and one for some rando D3 candidate I’ve never heard of in front of a business. That’s it.
Is it really election season?
You should make clear whether you are talking about the multi-member district city council races, or the single-winner Mayoral and Auditor races. Every voter has one of their ranks count toward a candidate, but that candidate might not win. Saying it means your vote wasn’t counted is misleading. Not everybody ranks a winner. In my quote from Deb Otis of Fairvote, she emphasizes that 85% of the voters in Cambridge, MA had ranked one of the three winners in a multi-member election. That’s an admirable result.
Cambridge also strongly favored its incumbents, which makes it more likely that those candidates would appear somewhere on the majority of ballots.
With 30 candidates to choose from in my district, and only one or two names that voters might recognize (one of whom was unpopular enough that he lost his last election despite having the advantages of incumbency), I don’t expect to see a similar result here.
There is a subtlety in the multi-member district elections which I think gets missed. Your district elects three representatives, not you. Only one of your ranks counts.
If you were to apply your same definition of “not counting” to conventional non-RCV tallying, how do you see the two systems comparing?
Just to be clear, in the case of the Alaska election, do we agree that if everyone who picked a Republican as their first choice had also picked the other Republican as their second choice, a Republican would have won handily? And that the reason that the Democrat won is because a sizeable number of people did not do that?
I think to understand this race, you have to imagine there were three parties in contention — Democrat, Republican, and Palin. While the Republicans preferred the Democrat to Palin, the Republican was the choice most closely aligned with the majority of Alaskans, and would have won in a system that accurately reflected the will of the voters. (Republican > Democrat > Palin)
The promise of RCV is that the mechanics of vote counting can recede into the background, but that promise seems to have been broken in this case.
I don’t recall that the promise of RCV was ever that the mechanics would “recede into the background”. I don’t see how that could ever be true, given that it’s a significantly more complex counting scheme.
The promise, as I understood it, is that it would more reliably produce outcomes that mirrored the will of the voters.
We’ll find out in a month if Alaska voters feel this promise was kept.
There are some people who have an ideological and partisan investment in convincing us RCV in Alaska was a failure and should be reversed. I think they are simply wrong, either in the conclusion that the system didn’t work as designed or that it was a failure. To be sure, no new system can be judged by one election. There has to be learning by doing. It is understandable that some voters under RCV will learn that if they don’t rank more than one candidate they are forfeiting part of their vote in a more representative voting system. RCV is not perfect. There are better voting systems. But RCV is an undeniable improvement on first past the post, the system often favored by those who just don’t want more representative voting or participatory government. RCV is better precisely because it asks more of voters in exercising their vote: it moves us toward a system that encourages and rewards rather than discourages and punishes deeper and more meaningful engagement.
Do any Oregon elections use “first past the post”? I think people may be misusing that term. It applies where multiple candidates are running and the one with the most votes wins often with a small plurality. Most elections have a primary and a general election between the two candidates with the most support in the primary. I suppose you can call it “first past the post” if there are multiple candidates with realistic chances, but that isn’t a very common situation.
The issue is not whether it is a perfect system but whether people are being mislead about how it works. Telling people that they don’t have to vote strategically is just plain wrong. And in Portland’s mayors race it is downright dangerous. Because if you rank a candidate who doesn’t have majority support ahead of one or more that does you can have an entirely different candidate winning with a minority of votes. That is what happened in Alaska.
Frankly I haven’t seen the Mayor’s race creating more meaningful engagement. In fact, I think there would be far more engagement if there was a primary that narrowed the field to two candidates for people to compare.
The city council situation is different with the complex interaction of all the changes. But has there really been any meaningful discussion going on in each district? My guess is there are a bunch of candidates who are out trying to round up 25% of the vote in their district from targeted voters. They aren’t trying to debate issues or persuade people. They are talking to the converted and trying to make sure they are ranked by them.
Under the old charter, the top two Portland City Council candidates with the most number of votes in the primary election faced a run-off in the general election, basically what you propose is preferable. But this doesn’t prevent write-in candidates; in other words minority of voters trying to register different preferences. As a result Ted Wheeler won re-election in 2020 with a less than 50% of the vote. It is unlikely he would be mayor today if we had RCV in 2020. This dynamic and the desire to have more voters represented in City Council elections and a fuller account of all voters preferences, are key reasons the Charter Commission proposed RCV. https://www.sightline.org/2020/11/19/portland-might-have-elected-a-new-mayor-with-ranked-choice-voting/
Your mayor example doesn’t actually catch the most likely possibility. Gonzales finishes first, Rubio second and the Mingus and Wilson voters refuse to vote for either one. Rubio because of her ticket problems and Gonzalez because they disagree with this politics. You have a perfect Alaska scenario only with two candidates with majority support losing to Gonzalez who the majority rejected.
The most likely possibility is that the “anyone but Rene” group picks Wilson or Rubio.
Unless they are also in the “anyone but Rubio” camp. In which case they choose Wilson and Mapps. If the Wilson and Mapps vote is smaller than the Rubio vote, then those ballots will have no effect on the outcome. It won’t matter how many Rubio voters had Mapps and Wilson ranked as their second choice.If even 10% of people vote only for Mapps and Wilson you can easily end up with neither of the candidates still standing having a majority of those voting.
I am assuming Gonzalez wins, but Rubio could win with the same effect with large numbers of Gonzalez voters ranking Wilson or Mapps and not Rubio.
Maybe you should look up the definition of majority vs. plurality. Maybe I will then understand what you are trying to say. Only one candidate can have majority support and they are elected.
No, not when people have more than one vote, albeit only one effective vote, because they can rank more than one candidate. Many candidates can have majority support and yet a candidate lacking it can win the election with a plurality.
At least one of Mapps and Wilson will survive the first round (given they each attract at least one vote), so it’s not really like the AK example. If one of Mapps and Wilson is the big loser of a round, ballots that were counting for them will be redistributed for the subsequent round. If Rubio and Gonzales are still in after both Mapps and Wilson are eliminated, they (Rubio and Gonzales) will both have had more support than Mapps and Wilson in the rounds in which Mapps and Wilson were eliminated, respectively. Did I miss something?
Oh great, we already had an electoral college system that gave us presidents who didn’t win the popular vote, and now we are going to have local elections where mayors and city council members who don’t win the popular vote are elected. What a sad joke.
On an entirely different note. Portland city government has the odor of a failing organization that is focused on solving its problems by re-writing its bylaws. I think the point of elections is to allow self-government, to have a discussion with the actual vote being temporary closure where people have not only made a decision, but understand what that decision was. It seems to me that this is putting everyone in their own little cubicle with a pencil making their own choices.
Far from empowering people it will be hard for them to know how their choices effected the outcome. Or how it effects the decisions made after the election. Or what they could do differently next time to effect a different outcome.
Just reading this nearly a month later. The comments were a very good read and debate. Wondering how people feel a month later, and now that it was reported Wilson could win? I’m excited for that chance.
Good to see there is growing dissent about the mess of RCV in Portland and how it is disenfranchising blue collar workers and POC
. I’m predicting a grass roots effort to get an initiative on our ballot to remove it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/pdxreal/p/the-facts-behind-the-national-ranked?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web