Portland ballot returns for tomorrow’s election are trending low. Optimists hope it is due to procrastination, but some vote watchers are becoming alarmed.
Since 2008, an average of 64% of Portland’s registered voters have participated in City Council Elections. This year, one day before the election, only 19% of Portland voters have returned their ballots. As the graphic above shows, this is part of low returns for Multnomah County in general, and is off-trend for elections since 2016. Keep in mind that interpretation of these graphs is complicated by a couple of things: 1) the 2022 election, shown with a green line, was not a presidential election—turnout for these off-cycle years is always lower and 2), Oregon changed its ballot return rules in 2021 to allow for ballots postmarked the day of the election to be received for up to seven days. The full procrastination-effect of the new postmark rule has not yet been tested in a presidential election year. (The high-propensity voters of 2022, the off-year, mostly got their ballots in by election day. That might not be true of the larger voting public in a presidential year.)
The yellow bars in the graph show Multnomah County ballots which have been returned over the past couple of weeks. The last bar, today’s return, was disappointingly low, and below the 2022 election line.
Count former Portland City Commissioner Amanda Fritz in the worried camp, as the re-tweet and comment from transportation designer Jarret Walker shows.
Multnomah County’s election dashboard (below) tells the more complete story. The table at the lower right shows Portland ballot returns of: 15% for District 1; 19.5% for District 2; 20% for District3; and 22% for District 4.
Statistics from the North Star Civic Foundation, a Portland non-profit with a focus on democracy, show that, since 2008, an average of 64% of Portland voters have participated in City Council elections.
I don’t think I have ever been in a position of hoping for procrastination, but here I am. It would be a shame if Trump took Oregon because Portland voters didn’t get their ballots in. Vote folks!
Thanks for reading.
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The numbers just changed — I guess that is to be expected. The Mult Co election dashboard no longer has a row for each City Council District, but is reporting City of Portland returns, as a whole, at 43%.
Interesting, when you compare the number of eligible voters versus the overall population of each district, you realize that fully a third of District 1 residents are not eligible to vote (101K versus 154K), apparently a much higher ratio than the other districts. For years East Portland has always had a much lower turnout than the rest of the city, now we have a slightly better notion of why that is.
Aye Carumba. Have years of feckless, ineffective local politicians dulled Portland’s civic responsibility? Between the “what the heck is this” ballot and the “who the heck are these people” candidates, voting took a little more effort than last time, but nothing insurmountable.
VOTE PEOPLE It matters
When the far right constantly does whatever they can to steal an election is it any wonder why many citizens have just given up figuring the whackos will win in the end?
Are there a lot of far right folks waiting in the wings in the wilds of eastern Oregon to pounce, move the Capitol to La Grande and take over?
I usually don’t submit my ballot to the last couple of days, so I am not necessarily causing a disturbance in the statistics. However, I did spend several hours on my district choices yesterday, watching interviews, reading endorsements, talking about it. Mostly on choices 4, 5, and 6. It was fun. I learned a lot, and I’m not surprised that it is taking people longer to drop off their ballots.
Thanks Lisa for sharing this nudge to get those ballots in! I’m hopeful that the most recent day’s count is a bit off – I dropped my ballot inside my local library on Sunday, and heard many others do so during the ~40 minutes I was completing it. I have yet to get a text from the County that my ballot was received, leading me to think there’s a delay in processing those.
But as I write this there are still 28 hours to get that ballot in – make the most of them!
These numbers are hard to follow – how does 251K returned out of 579K eligible (43%) square with the 19% “one day before the election” ?
My husband also thought I wasn’t real clear with that. Multnomah County is larger than Portland. The top graph refers to Mult Co voters, so do the top-line stats of the Mult Co Dashboard. I’m getting the CoP stats from the breakdown in the lower right corner of the dashboard.
Otherwise, I’m just reporting the numbers they are outputting.
(Also, just noticed that my editor removed my final chart of stats. I’ve re-inserted it.)
The numbers on the election dashboard just changed, and they did away with counts by City Council district. (Thank God I have a screenshot or I’d think I was nuts.) They are now just showing City of Portland, and they have the return at 43%.
I worked very close to Multnomah County building for years. There was always a line for ballot drop-off on election day. My perception is simply procrastination of area voters. Don’t get your panties in a bunch just yet. Portland will come through.
I detect anxiety in your piece. Did you vote yet?
Yeah, a couple of weeks ago.
I detect confusion in your post – if everyone always procrastinates, the numbers this year should be similar to previous years, but they aren’t. Hence the article.
I have never missed voting in a single election that I’ve been eligible for over decades. This ballot was so difficult to understand that it took me a while to decide how to use it. For voters who have lower likelihood of voting I can totally see how it just makes them throw their hands in the air and say f-it this is too much to deal with.
A new voting system (ranked choice), a new city council structure, and no incumbents running for mayor or city council surely made this more work for a lot of people. I voted, but about a week later than I usually do.
I wouldn’t call it procrastination so much as “research is a bigger investment now, so if you’re not simply following a voter guide then you need more time to read up on everything”. Even then, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a lot of folks agonizing over the presidential race up until the last minute.
We got together with friends on Friday for a “ballot party”, and the process took about 4 hours. Much to my surprise it was Measure 118 research that took up the most time, but City Council research was a close second. We dropped our ballots off at the post office today.
It would be dark comedy for sure. Especially once you layer in the odds he wins Portland is effectively zero, yet the lunatics will still destroy Portland in their tantrum.
The Electoral college has made our presidential vote meaningless, we don’t have a Governor race or meaningful congressional race.
The idiotic ranked choice ballot with insane amount of candidates has probably given people pause after they looked at it….
I think the vote total will end up OK but low compared to the last 10 years.
The ranked choice along with the new council format at the same time will make it impossible to judge whether one or the other even worked for a couple years.
Portland has to keep being a Guinea pig for dumb ideas.
Yeah. I imagine the “rank six out of 30” candidates thing in the mayoral and city council races is causing a lot of delay in Portland. I’m a politics geek and I found it daunting and a little confusing. The only reason I returned my ballot quickly was because (being a politics geek) I did my homework and ranked those races a few weeks before the ballots were sent out. I can’t see many normal folks with actual lives doing that.
I wonder how many people will just bag it in the end and turn in their ballot with those races blank.