Straight-out-of-the-gate, District 3’s Steve Novick and D4’s Olivia Clark received more than the (25% + 1) of votes needed to win a City Council position, making them last night’s only candidates to “win” the count on first choice rankings alone. Other candidates also received a winning (25% + 1) votes, but they needed many rounds of transfer votes to arrive at that tally.
Keep in mind that this is only the first day of vote tabulation, the D4 tabulation was based on about 45,000 verified ballots, or 38% of approximately 120,000 eligible voters. More ballots will be coming in over the next few days, and the Multnomah County Election Division will be rerunning the ranking calculation fresh each day, on the entirety of all verified ballots.
Also worth noting is that there were not any Council District upsets in which a candidate was dislodged out of the first place position by another candidate’s accumulated transfer votes.
Multnomah County has posted detailed grids of the rankings and vote transfers, making it possible to trace through, round by round, how “winners” accumulated their votes. Anyone who has followed my posts knows that this is catnip for me. And after going through the table of transfers I can declare a winner: ranked-choice voting (RCV), with single-transferable vote (STV) in multi-member districts.
It’s a mouthful, but a closer look at some of the D4 transfers shows that, yes, the method successfully gives a voice on council to voters who hold minority positions on issues.
This is going to be another one of my dweeby posts which gets into the weeds with the STV algorithm and some numbers. But by the end of it I hope to show how a minority position in D4, namely a deep discomfort with jailing campers who refuse to accept relocation to city-provided alternative shelter or treatment, found its expression in candidate Mitch Green through transfer votes. (At least after day one of tabulation).
As an example, I’m going to look at the fate of three of the top-ranked candidates — Eric Zimmerman, Mitch Green and Eli Arnold — and show how the transfer votes of much lower-ranked candidates Lisa Freeman, Chad Lykins and Sarah Silkie dealt Portland police officer Eli Arnold a blow in the final rounds. At play is the issue of law enforcement’s role in enforcing Portland’s camping ban. Clark, Zimmerman and Arnold advocate a “Shelter for all” approach to camping, in which the possibility of being arrested acts as a “backstop” to requiring a range of other living situations, including treatment and Portland’s Temporary Alternative Shelter Sites (TASS).
Green, Freeman, Lykins and Silkie are more acceptable to voters who prefer Multnomah County’s “Housing First” model, which advocates for permanent housing without treatment requirements or sobriety barriers.
The screenshots I’m showing come from Multnomah County’s Unofficial Preliminary Election Results. The top segment shows Olivia Clark in first place with 12,315, or 27%, of the votes. Because she is over the 25% + 1 required to win, 1,053 of her votes are “transferred” to other candidates based on who her voters ranked as their 2nd choice. As you can see in the 3rd column, about half of Clark’s voters ranked Zimmerman 2nd, and also favored Eli Arnold. This transfer of 519 votes moves Zimmerman to 2nd place (12.59%), a lead he holds for all but one of remaining rounds.
Clark’s vote transfer puts Eli Arnold and Mitch Green in an even tighter race for the remaining rounds, and they stay in a tight range until the final rounds which eliminated Lisa Freeman, Chad Lykins, and Sarah Silkie. The transfers from those candidates favored Green over Arnold by several-fold, and opened up a five-point lead for Green in the final three rounds.
And that’s how a minority position about enforcing Portland’s camping ban has found an expression in one of the three District four representatives.
Take all of this with the caveat that the total vote is not yet in. Multnomah County will release tonight’s counts at 6:00 PM. I will be looking to see if there is any change in ordering that is associated with early voters versus those whose ballots came in too late for the Tuesday count.
Thanks for reading.
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It seems weird to argue that STV resulted in more diverse
political representation* in D4 when a simple top 3 ranking would have produced the same result. I think it is the multi-candidate district that is producing political diversity in your example, not the wackadoodle 31-round vote transfer process.
PS: I voted for state-wide ranked choice yesterday even though I think it’s a flawed voting system (but still far better than the current system[and especially primary elections]).
After the first round of counts Arnold and Green were separated by about a third of a percent. STV widened it to five.
I think it’s impossible to say what would have happened with a top three ranking. I think the transferable part of the STV is important in letting people pick who they really want.
For example, (not talking about the specifics of these candidates):
In this case, Green and Zimmerman were essentially tied. I find it easy to believe that enough people wouldn’t have ranked Green #1, and instead went with someone they thought was more mainstream. Lets say Clark, giving her say 35% of the vote. 10% of the votes wasted.
The fact that your vote is transferred from your #1 if there is an excess is another reason this system makes you more free to vote for your real favorite at #1. Unfortunately though I don’t think you can look at results and assume the top 3 of round 1 would have been the top 3 in some other non-tranferable system.
I think most people just voted their preferences without thinking deeply about the mechanics of vote transfer and/or vote exhaustion.
Bloc star voting does not require vote transfers and would almost certainly have had a similar results.
The more I learn about it, the less I like STAR voting. It’s a little easier on the computer programmer, but harder conceptually for the voter. I could see some algorithm-challenged folks giving five stars to all their choices. It requires the voter understanding how to maximize the impact of their star-ranking in a way that might seem counterintuitive to some people.
I think just about every voter understands how star ratings work (e.g. rank restaurants/movies/candidates from zero to 5 stars). Furthermore, it’s intuitive because the SIMPLE tabulation round simply adds up the numerical scores (1-5) to determine the instant run off. And finally, star voting avoids wasted votes which contribute to the the numerous examples of RCV violating basic principles of election fairness.
Hard disagree on this one – RCV/variants have a lot more “strategy” involved than STAR. STAR’s also an easier ballot to fill out, and scales better (we “solved” the scaling problem with our RCV by limiting users to 6, but that greatly reduces RCV’s expressiveness – but if we allowed full rankings and still required a scantron, that’d be a 30×30 ballot for D3. STAR, on the other hand, scales linearly).
Scoring individuals on a (as Will/etc points out) common ranking we already use elsewhere like Amazon or Yelp independent of each other is also cognitively easier than ranking. And the only instructions one really needs to “maximize” their ballot is: “Give your most favorite(s) 5, and your least favorite(s) 0”. Everything in between is optional.
Put it this way: Imagine taking your D4 candidates and ranking them all. Now imagine taking your D4 candidates and giving them all a 0-5 score. Which one is easier?
It’s unfortunate that this very consequential electoral decision was made by city staff (not the commission) and that it somewhat increased the likelihood of discarded votes.
I think the shortcomings of STV/RCV are nearly insignificant. But I’m reading more about STAR and I’m convinced it is superior.
The scenario I’m thinking of is, e.g. we have three “main stream” but meh candidates with wide appeal, and 10 candidates that are well liked, but all fit into the same niche. Maybe most people like those 10 but between them there is no significant differentiator. E.g. they’re all really good on homelessness and have nearly identical (and well liked!) plans. So the vote is split randomly between the 10 and none of them win.
In other words vote splitting.
I think in practice it’s really unlikely because we just don’t have *that* many option (thank goodness, if we had hundreds it really would be hard to coordinate / easy to manipulate). But I can see it happening, so I’d like to shore up that risk.
I don’t think it should be an insurmountable lift to pass a measure that replaces our current system with STAR if that gains traction. We don’t have to go the reactionary route of voting ourselves out of this incremental improvement first.
The STV algorithm is elegant, and outputs an information-rich table about the opinions of voters.
I think most voters would dislike STAR because it offers too many choices for how to score, and it’s not obvious that each voter has an equivalently-weighted vote. In STV, you can choose unpopular candidates and end up not having your vote count toward a winner (although that does not happen to many people). But with STAR, it’s a voter’s choice of star ranges which might lessen the impact of their vote relative to other voters. Or at least, it’s not obvious to a voter why that wouldn’t be the case.
The simplest example: mono-toned rankings (giving all candidates the same number of stars), whether 5 or 1 or 0, are equivalent. But what if a voter restricts themselves to a range of 0 to 2 stars? Will that voter have the same impact as a voter who restricts themselves to a range of 3 to 5 stars?
Further, otherwise equal voters then come to have
unequal weights in the election, depending on their propensity to use extreme grades.
We suggest that these two properties are unlikely to be desirable for a democracy.
https://hal.science/hal-03095898/file/WP_HAL.pdf
I’d hate to try to explain that to a room full of voters.
I’m repeating myself, but I find this very easy to explain:
Yes, this was my question as well actually. I assume the question is answered somewhere (haven’t found it today), but it does seem possible that someone voting all 5s has more impact than someone voting all 3s. If you’re just “summing the stars and picking the winner” it would have to mean that. That feels wrong.
I think I’ve heard arguments for “approval voting” or something, where I think you just yay or nay candidates. It might eliminate that problem but I feel like that does a bad job and loses any meaningful preference.
Yeah, there are things to like about STV over STAR.
Yeah, you’ve nailed it.
One thing that helped it click for me that RCV doesn’t eliminate vote splitting is that it’s really just a series of FPTP rounds run automatically. It turns out that actually does solve some of FPTP’s issues – but not all, as many as supporters claim.
Alaska really is the perfect illustration: In 2022, Begich was the Condorcet winner* (from everything I’ve seen, anyway) and RCV failed to elect him, due to vote splitting (people will handwave this for various reasons, but the bottom line is the voters wanted an R, and because two R’s ran with one D, got a D instead). That’s one of the biggest failures of a voting system in voting circles, but also just hits people intuitively – when it happens, RCV typically gets repealed shortly after (Burlington, Vermont is the most well-trod example, but Alaska will be the new one if the repeal vote’s lead is certified). And voila, Begich won in 2024.
While it’s true much of the RCV repeal energy across the country is from simple anti-democracy Republicans, we ignore the true voter backlash at our peril. While RCV advocates stress this scenario is unlikely, it’s the main scenario where it really matters (a competitive three+ way race).
* For the non-wonks, the Condorcet winner is the candidate who would beat all other candidates in a head-to-head matchup. A Condorcet winner doesn’t always exist (A might beat B who might beat C who might beat A, for example), but when they do, a voting method damn well better pick them.
I’ve seen conflicting claims here. I’ve also read that the Democrat was the Condorcet winner. And I don’t think the fact that Begich won in 2024 is very informative, because 2024 isn’t 2022 and maybe people didn’t like what the incumbent was doing.
“maybe people didn’t like what the incumbent was doing.”
I’m sure they didn’t, because the incumbent was a Democrat, and they wanted a Republican.
Good! That is the goal! I don’t think that’s what people do when faced with a regular first past the post vote.
I don’t remember the details but I think I’ve looked into it and assuming you’re right, I agree we should use that. Maybe we can change to that system some day. I’m just tired of hearing all the complaints about this STV system because of the existence of another, better system. Our new system is unambiguously better than what we had, and things move too slowly and are too cumbersome to have started the process over and worked towards a different system. Lets take the (very significant!) improvement and go from there.
But I get the frustration. If there was a clearly superior, well known system right there, why didn’t we use that while we had the chance to change things? I don’t know, I’m curious as well. Do you have any ideas?
The charter commission delegated this decision to a subcommittee that after lengthy deliberation chose star voting. At the very last minute and with little transparency or debate, several members of the charter commission did a 360 and voted for STV. The fact that many of those who voted for STV ended up running for council (some dropped out) still burns my britches due to the flagrant conflict of interest.
Money. FairVote is a multi-million dollar advocacy org dedicated to pushing RCV. STAR, on the other hand, is primarily pushed by a pretty scrappy group of mostly volunteers here in Oregon.
I’ve seen this in action first-hand during state legislative testimony a cycle back (this was just for a bill to have a committee to start talking about alternative voting methods); the RCV lobbyists are no less sleazy or dishonest than any you’d expect from the tobacco or oil industry. It was a shocking experience for me, to be honest, given that I figured voting reform would be niche and generally evidence-based with folks on the same page (and to be clear and fair, RCV has lots of good-faith/honest advocates who fit into this camp. FairVote does not). How naive of me!
“Our new system is unambiguously better than what we had”
Along some axes, such as the ability to express yourself through your ballot. It is unambiguously worse along others, such as intuitiveness and comprehendability.
The way detractors talk about this, it’s as if they think this isn’t a material difference. Like this just gives the warm and fuzzies.
It’s the difference between the Prisoner’s Dilemma problem with or without being able to talk to other people. It gives a materially different, and better, outcome. With our previous system, everyone has to “play it safe” to avoid bad outcomes, but doesn’t vote for who they actually want and misses more preferred (for most people) outcomes. With our new system, that problem is all but completely eliminated. This is huge. It’s a win-win for everyone except politicians who stood to gain from a less democratic process.
And you can say it’s less intuitive, sure. Tic-tac-toe is more intuitive and comprehendable than checkers, but both are trivially easy to understand.
“The way detractors talk about this, it’s as if they think this isn’t a material difference.”
Kind of like the way that supporters completely discount values such as intuitiveness and transparency. In a time when we are suffering from record low trust in the system, those values are increasingly important.
There is no objectively correct answer, it’s just how you weigh competing values.
Will the: You might be interested in this paper:
https://hal.science/hal-03095898/file/WP_HAL.pdf
It’s in English, and is about experiments conducted during real elections in France using various ranking systems on test groups of voters. So it’s empirical. I haven’t read it carefully, but the conclusion is that various ranking ranges do not produce the same results.
The paper focuses on scaling (negative and increased scaling), not on comparing different types of voting system.
Yeah, but STAR allows a voter to scale in weird ways, there is no restriction.
STAR is not ready for prime time. It’s a home-grown algorithm that has a local coterie of enthusiasts. The next step in promoting it would be to find a political scientist or computer scientist interested in studying it, build up some academic papers, etc.
Till then, I need to be able to write about the success of the system Portland has voted to use without the comments turning into a VHS/Beta debate every time.
They’re on it: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10602-022-09389-3
I prefer DVDs.
To be fair, in the beginning during the commission, it was RCV versus STAR – and you simply won’t be able to shake me from the STAR > RCV conclusion. But then the commission brought in multi-member districts, which is a whole different ball game. STV versus STAR is apples versus oranges, and I simply hadn’t the imagination to think we’d suddenly have multimember districts to investigate what the alternatives in that space look like.
But I take your point, and I’ll leave it here: I like STV better than what we were doing before. I voted for it (mostly for the city manager and the multimember districts, but hey). I voted no on 117 because I believe RCV is the worst alternative on offer, and 117’s version particularly bad (leaving in primaries, leaving out state legislative races – Oregon’s need to have a scantron ballot meaning rankings have to be arbitrarily limited, etc) – and there simply isn’t political appetite to keep messing around or fine tune. As far as I’m aware, no RCV repeal went to another alternative – they always just revert back to FPTP. And stay there for decades, if not indefinitely.
Damien, I hope you can tell, I enjoy the discussion, and thank you for your nice comment. All this makes me feel like a programmer again, or at least exercises the muscle a little.
I’m not sure I love the redistribution of the overvote. Seems like this is more likely to reinforce the opinions of the majority. Once you get your desired candidate, I don’t think you should get to “keep voting.”
Not gonna pretend this is well thought out at this point; more of a gut feeling. But something I’m gonna have to look into some more.
You do not get to “keep voting”. You get one single floating point vote. All it does when there are excess votes for a candidate, those aren’t wasted. This prevents people from having to do shenanigans like try and four dimensional chess who they should rank first. You simply rank your actual favorite candidate first. If people just honestly vote who they want, in order, the outcome is a good representation of that, unless they had super outlier views, in which case, there’s only so much that can be done with three representatives. (I guess you could get wild and allow unlimited rankings – maybe they should, although that’s not really relevant to your point).
Take for example if you had 80% of all voters in lock step putting candidate A #1. If all their votes were “used up”, the remaining two candidates would be picked by a fifth of the voters. That’s pretty disenfranchising, and I can’t see how it would be good. Certainly it wouldn’t be fair representation. Instead, a fraction of those votes go to their second choice.
If they’re all in lock step with their rankings, then yeah, those 80% of voters determined most of the outcome. But that’s good, isn’t it? At least 80% are satisfied with the results.
I don’t think this system is meant to give a disproportionate representation to a minority. I think the problem it addresses is people otherwise strategically don’t vote for who they actually want, and we end up getting many, maybe even most, voters unsatisfied with the results. So by actually representing what people want, that opens up the possibility for otherwise non-mainstream candidates to win a seat.
It’s one person, one vote. Nobody’s vote counts more than 1.0 points.
Now, if a greater than 25% majority picks a popular candidate, the percentage of their 1-point vote is split between their first- and second-ranked choices. But it all still totals no more than one point.
This simply isn’t true. Some fraction of votes (sometimes a large fraction) are discarded and never contribute to the total in the final round.
I guess that seems like a feature rather than a bug, to me.
I don’t think it’s a huge flaw but when this voting system fails it becomes a flashpoint and one of the major reasons that people vote to move back to dumb majoritarian systems as is happening in Alaska right now:
RCV is a flawed voting system but Fair Vote’s gazillionaire-funded disinformation campaign does a great job at suppressing better alternative voting systems.
Was the Burlington VT 2009 election also a “feature”?
Montroll lost despite being the clear Condorcet winner:
https://medium.com/@karthikayyala/when-ranked-choice-voting-goes-bad-the-2009-burlington-mayoral-election-e4e36572998d
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_election#cite_note-:gsmc-22
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371515564_An_Examination_of_Ranked-Choice_Voting_in_the_United_States_2004-2022
I don’t have a problem with any of that. The transfer of votes is not symmetrical up and down. Downward transfers are fractional, upward transfers are whole, and there is no revisiting an eliminated candidate. Only surplus votes transfer down (fractionally), to non-eliminated candidates. That is one elegant set of rules, with subtle benefits which emerge when running actual data sets.
Let me put it a different way: there is a difference between ranking and scoring. Remember the bad old days when undergraduate men used to sit at the window of collegiate sports bars and “score” the appearance of women who passed by? I don’t want to do that to the candidates.
I will “rank” them in order of my preference for representing me.
“Scoring” can be transferred symmetrically, “ranking” can’t. There isn’t an equivalence between ranks.
And one more thing! “Scoring” is susceptible to each voter using a self-selected range, which might unintentionally discount some voters relative to others.
Votes being “discarded” because ballots were discarded are not any different than the people voting for a losing candidate in first-past-the-post having no representation in who is elected to the office. Ballot exhaustion is a red herring.
No it’s not a red herring because the charter committee could have voted for a far simpler ranking system that does not have wasted votes and is not prone to a small but real chance of unfair outcomes (Condorcet failures).
There’s no such thing as a voting system without “wasted votes” because there are always winners and losers. Well, I suppose you could force people to rank every single candidate, and then technically nobody’s vote would be “wasted,” but it would be profoundly undemocratic.
I keep coming back to this not being a failure of the system. Your vote is “discarded” or not counted if you only voted for losing candidates. Period. There aren’t weird alternatives. This is no different than if we have first past the post and your only vote is on a losing candidate.
Your RCV ballot represents, to the best of your ability, the set of your opinions and how they relate to candidates in the race. If nothing about your opinions overlaps with enough of the voting majority, you don’t get representation. It’s an inevitability in any system because we have fewer representatives than people. You cannot get everyone, unless everyone agrees on everything.
What is happening in Alaska doesn’t illustrate a problem with RCV or with the PR for RCV. It is no different than any other lie-mongering Republican talking point (like blaming immigrants for underemployment). “It didn’t go our way, here is a scapegoat”. RCV didn’t fail in Alaska, it accurately represented the votes. If people lied on their ballot (i.e. ranked only one candidate when that doesn’t actually reflect what they want), that is not a unique failure of RCV. But republicans (who prefer minoritarian rule) will spin it that way and their base will eat it up.
In short, the pushback in Alaska is the result of lies from Republicans, not a failure of RCV. Democracy (or whatever vague imitation of democracy we have) doesn’t save people from voting out democracy.
RCV in Alaska created an absolutely perverse result. It may be mathematically correct, but it makes absolutely no sense to most people (including me) that voting for Palin helped elect the Democrat.
Perverse results do not strengthen democracy.
Palin told her supporters not to rank her opponent. That pissed off the supporters of her opponent, who, non-perversely, reciprocated by not ranking Palin. Palin thus did not receive the transfers she needed to beat the Democrat. Alaskans are very happy with the Democrat they elected.
STV punishes selfishness.
So you think a voting system that punishes less well-informed people (e.g. less-educated or less leisure-having people) is a good thing?
There is also some evidence that complex ranking systems can lead to higher-rates of incorrect voting by low-income people and certain minorities.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1532673X231220640
I think STAR voting is more complex for the voter than RCV.
Essentially, they have (had) instant runoff as well as instant protest votes.
If someone doesn’t rank an alternative, that’s the same as saying “don’t vote in the runoff”. Which, sure, you can do that.
I don’t believe the Alaska RCV system uses STV. In fact, STV doesn’t work in a single-winner contest, it’s just for multi-winner contests.
It’s OK to be confused about this – it’s complicated!
Looks like RCV is on track to be repealed in Alaska, incidentally.
I get confused with simple things too! Don’t mis-characterize my confusion.
That’s not it at all: Had Palin been “generous” the result would likely have been the same.
The logical winner would have been the moderate Republican. He was the “median” candidate, and the Condorcet winner. I’m not arguing Palin should have won, just that by voting for her you should not increase the chances the Democrat would win. That’s what makes the race perverse, and illustrates that RCV does not fix the problems it purports to.
In that case, the outcome was absurd, and the voters didn’t want it to happen again, so Alaska no longer has RCV.
But the Democrat, Peltola, got the most votes in the first round. She was the plurality winner. It was a Condorcet failure, but not one that bothered the Alaska voters much, they elected Peltola again three months later in the regular election (the Condorcet failure happened in a special election due to vacancy from death of office-holder).
Condorcet failures don’t bother me that much. A lot of Begich voters ranked Peltola as 2nd choice, that’s why she won.
What’s your view on why Alaskans rejected RCV after trying it a few times?
Haven’t followed it, so no view.
Wouldn’t make sense to me either, so it’s a good thing that isn’t what happened. There is no way in this election where voting for Palin helped the Democrat. Perhaps voting for Palin and leaving the rest of your ballot blank meant your actual second choice lost, sure. If you lie on your ballot, or draw a smiley face with the bubbles on the ballot, you’ve thrown away your vote.
As I mentioned somewhere else, the reason people got upset was because Republicans don’t like fair elections and the voters will believe lies.
“There is no way in this election where voting for Palin helped the Democrat.”
And yet, that’s what happened.
It doesn’t matter who Palin voters ranked after her, as she was only eliminated in the final round.
Regardless, Alaskans repealed RCV, indicating they didn’t like it for some reason, even if they were happy with the outcome of that election.
That is not, in fact, what happened.
You can’t base your opinions of RCV on the results of the first round, or adding up the votes republicans got, or any other nonsense. Because people voted with the knowledge that they were using RCV, it’s apples to oranges.
The Alaska RCV measure is still too close to call Thursday. Lots of rural votes left to count, and many of those are Pelota supporters (which is why the Pelota race hasn’t been called yet either).
Open primaries and a top two advance would be my preference over (or with) RCV, but RCV works. It just works in a meaningfully different way that produces different results. It does not “throw away” any votes, but it does result in all but one candidate losing.
It was not mathematically correct if you value fair elections (e.g. a Condorcet failure).
True — I just meant the pre-agreed rules were followed.
John V explains it pretty well, but if you want a further example, this video (timestamped at relevant part) shows why you need to transfer votes away from winners, lest you end up with very unrepresentative results. He’s using animals to represent parties, but in a non-partisan election like Portland’s you can interpret them as political factions or voting blocs (e.g. progressives vs moderates vs conservatives).
So you want people with fringe ideas to get more voting power? What could possibly go wrong?
The fact that the top three number-one-ranked candidates in all four districts ended up winning shows that “fringe candidates” did not in fact get elected. The system worked, allowing people to vote for those candidates but also giving them the chance to rank other more viable candidates so their vote wasn’t completely wasted. And the winners seem to be mix of progressive and moderate candidates you would expect in Portland, and none of them seem remotely “fringe.”
The fringe argument was always fallacious; people got stuck on “only 25% of the vote!” instead of what that actually meant: The three most popular candidates in a given district. By definition, those will not be “fringe” (at least in the scope of that district).
I’m so glad this failed at the state level and can’t wait to vote to repeal it at the local level.
Where RCV has been implemented, it has become popular. Attempts to repeal often fail. The only locations I’m aware that have repealed it have been in one-party controlled locations where RCV has resulted in a candidate winning that said party didn’t like. (see: Alaska.)
I cannot express how much RCV neuters groupthink and moderates candidates.
It’s not that the parties didn’t like the system, it’s that the voters didn’t like it.
Or maybe the products of Portland’s public schools just couldn’t understand it.
The far right (Trumper’s legions) worked hard since 2020 to change the voting laws to keep poor people from voting. It obviously worked.
I see RCV as the far left’s version to try and get people elected that they like because the one’s the back consistently lose.
Many of the candidates I’ve voted for over the years don’t win. Doesn’t make me want to change the voting system because I’m a sore loser and my candidates lost.
I know, I’ll be a minority opinion, but how many voters do you actually think understand the STV algorithms?
I found the whole RCV an overly complex solution in search of a problem to solve. One person one vote has worked for thousands of years and the person with the most votes wins. No fancy computing power needed or weird “transfers” of votes. Really? That’s somehow better???
Fortunately, the rest of the state saw, with the overwhelming downvote of a statewide RCV, that it’s not a welcome solution. Hopefully, a repeal of it for Portland will come in the near future.
C’est la vie.
The point is they don’t need to understand it. They just vote their preferences, and the system turns those preferences into results, more accurately than the old system.
I think “they” (meaning “everybody”) need to be able to understand the system. A black box process requiring complicated programming, not easily auditable, is not going to encourage trust.
It is easily auditable. By everyone? No. But by thousands of programmers. It’s a trivial process.
It’s really not trivial – at least to audit in a way that the majority of people can understand. It does no good if only an elite cadre can understand it/feel confident about the process.
The system is completely auditable. What it lacks is being intuitive to people who don’t spend a lot of time thinking about voting.
I said easily auditable.
I don’t understand the problem here. It’s actually very intuitive.You pick a set of people who you would be happy enough with winning, and rank them in order of preference. Everyone understands that, and the ballot is trivially easy to fill out.
Are you (or other people) saying we can only have a voting system that doesn’t involve any calculation beyond summing up two numbers and see which is bigger? If so that limits our ability to accurately reflect preferences, and instead the complexity goes on each individual to try and predict the future and game out scenarios to make sure their vote matters. Way too complex. And completely vulnerable to media manipulation (i.e. telling people who is winning in polls, which informs decisions about strategic voting). And besides, nobody actually knows how votes are tabulated even now! You put your ballot in the mail and “somehow” it gets counted. Where are they aggregated, how are they read, scanned, whatever. We always have to hand wave away some complexity we can’t have access to because we’re not omniscient.
RCV is far more simple, honestly. Because you don’t have to think about *anything* beyond what candidates you like.
In other words, this is what STAR voting does.
The problem with RCV is that your second or even third rankings can have more weight than your first. STAR voting fixes this ridiculous flaw.
I think that’s debatable. Your vote should have exactly the same weight no matter the outcome (imo). Either a vote for one of the winners or not.
My concerns with STAR (and maybe this is answered) is that your vote counts for more if you vote all 5 stars, vs more accurately if I say candidate A is 5, B is 3, a few others are 1. Someone that ranks them all 5 seems to contribute more, which seems like a bad result to me. At least, it’s not intuitive what happens or what should happen.
I don’t know, maybe that doesn’t matter. I haven’t thought about it enough.
But that’s a good thing! If my first choice loses (so it has no weight), I’d like it if my vote went to my second choice. But maybe you mean something more subtle than this?
This is a problem with straight score voting, but STAR solves this with the automatic runoff – or, to be more accurate, incentivizes against this, because if you score candidates equally, you’ve waived your say in the runoff (=you’re saying you like them both equally). And if you do like all your 5 star candidates equally, well, then, STAR is allowing you to express your honest opinion. As long as every ballot as at least one 5 and one 0, they “weigh” equally. And in the end, the automatic runoff turns every ballot into 1.0 “vote”(s) regardless, just like RCV.
Most of the time this is true. But the order of eliminations can greatly skew things. Imagine a scenario where your 1st place pick stays put for a number of rounds, during which your 2nd place pick has been eliminated – but where your vote (and those of your same ranking peers) would’ve prevented your 2nd place’s elimination, if only your 1st place had been eliminated earlier. Then your 1st is eliminated, and now you’re down to your 3rd, though the same thing may have happened there, 4th, etc and so on – and because Portland doesn’t allow you to rank everyone, maybe that leaves you with no eligible rankings left. Had you, say, swapped your 1st and 6th rank (and 6th was eliminated early), maybe your 2nd would’ve won instead of being eliminated.
This is unlikely! But possible. And more likely the more viable frontrunners there are.
I’ll have to look into this. Glad to hear they solve that question I had.
I will say, for one of the complaints people have about our new system (is it accurately called STV? RCV with STV? Whatever) is too complicated, STAR is starting to sound pretty complicated. Hard to explain. And I think that’s ok, because I’m most concerned that it seems to work well and that experts have evaluated it. That’s the thing – it might be a nice to have if a system can trivially be understood by everyone. All things being equal, that would be best. But all things are not equal, sometimes they’re complicated. Like global warming, which some people still don’t understand, or pick your complex topic that not everyone has to understand.
It’s RCV for the mayor and auditor, STV for the city council. The main distinction being RCV is for a single-member district (like STAR), whereas STV is for multimember districts.
As for “hard to explain”, it really depends on what level you want to explain it at. At the most basic level, they’re all easy to explain: RCV: “Rank your candidates in order of preference” (the end). STAR: “Score your candidates between 0 and 5” (the end). Plurality: “Choose one”. Approval: “Choose as many as you like”.
But if you want to start explaining what those are actually doing, yeah, things get more complicated pretty quickly. And I don’t think there’s any way around that besides sacrificing expressiveness. Approval is honestly probably the best compromise between them all: It’s not as expressive as RCV or STAR, but it’s much better than FPTP, and if anything, simpler (you basically cannot spoil an Approval ballot as long as you stay in the bubbles. You can easily spoil a Plurality, STAR, or especially an RCV ballot). As easy to count/audit as FPTP. Just as easy for everyone to understand (it’s still just a simple sum). No difference between single- and multimember districts. Doesn’t need a primary. Only needs a single text change from our pre-RCV/STV ballots. I prefer the added expressiveness, but I’d vote for Approval in a heartbeat.
Where it can get sticky is the definition of “one person one vote”, which Approval can run afoul of depending on how one defines that and what court you take it to.
How many people understand the electoral college?
RE: “The screenshots I’m showing come from Multnomah County’s Unofficial Preliminary Election Results.”
Thanks for sharing this link. I really appreciate the transparency and detailed notes provided by Multnomah Elections. While I found the pie-chart types of explainers helpful, the actual results with narrative context are even more informative.
P.S. We’re taking a rest day in Zambujeira do Mar (Portugal) today, and I imagine we’ll have some interesting conversations with other trekkers about the US election results. So far, those from the UK and Germany have been pretty shocked.
In India, people are mostly saying Trump is the better choice. When they can get specific they say he’ll stop wars.
The American view of world reactions seems overly focused on Europe.
South and Southeast Asia have tons of growth unlike flatlining Europe which is divided into increasingly reactionary and inward looking governments. In Vietnam, Cambodia, Phillipines, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka etc, opinions on USA v. China as partners on economic development are ongoing and it would behoove us to pay attention to this.
I suppose European thought matters for cooperation on military adventures, but I for one hope we’ll take a break on those.
Asia seems to care mostly about trade and stopping wars, they don’t share the moral view of geopolitics of the American left. In the first chapters of the Bhagavad Gita Krishna takes pains to separate personal morality from war.
I would retitle your headline to:
Last night’s LOSER?: Multimember RCV with Single Transferable Vote
So glad RCV lost statewide. Hope the current voting system which disenfranchises voters is repealed.
Any particular reason? Or just that it failed to elect your preferred lock em up, tough on crime, Republican with a D mayor candidate? He lost badly. Portland didn’t want that.
In an election most people considered very important, the turnout was the least in 12 years. The process was the reason, it actually hurt democracy, not helped.
Fewer voters is not what I would call a better system and the actual results of the election (whether it produced a good city council) will not be known for a couple years.
I don’t believe anyone who considered this an important election was deciding not to return their ballot because of RCV. So I really question if it was actually “most people considered very important”. Despite our best wishes, local politics aren’t the biggest driver of voter turnout. The presidential race is, though, and that wasn’t impacted by RCV. So maybe people didn’t feel the race was as important as you’re asserting.
“I don’t believe anyone who considered this an important election was deciding not to return their ballot because of RCV.”
If you eliminate the most obvious explanation (for no reason), what is your view on why turnout was lower? That Portlanders were indifferent about the return of Trump (and the condition of Portland’s streets), so couldn’t be bothered to vote?
I don’t think that is the most obvious explanation? It seems non-obvious to me, and I gave my reason. I don’t think anyone who considered this an important election failed to vote because of RCV, because most of the election was not ranked. Local races are not the biggest driver for turnout (sadly), the general election for president is, and that wasn’t ranked, so it doesn’t make sense to think RCV was a factor in that.
Historically complicated ballot with dozens of candidates to wade through with a voters guide like a phonebook seems an unlikely explanation for why people didn’t vote? Really?
As usual, I see it differently. And, as usual, I’m pretty certain that most people would agree with me because what I’m saying seems so obvious.
Dozens of candidates were going to be on the ballot no matter the voting method.
Wow, you see it differently and you think you’re right, news at 11.
If nobody had even told me RCV was coming it would have been a blip as far as understanding. There is nothing to learn that wasn’t explained perfectly clearly with three easier-than-Ikea instructions pictures at the top of the page.
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2024/11/portlands-ranked-choice-debut-causes-voter-engagement-to-crater-1-in-5-who-cast-ballots-chose-no-one-for-city-council.html
Only 1, ONE, race on the entire ballot was RCV! That’s not a “complicated ballot”. I didn’t know anything about the City Council candidates, nor did I know anything about the district I was in.
The Willy Week’s online voting guide and a short call w. a friend got me sorted out quickly for Clark and Zimmerman. Silkie didn’t make the cut.
In other words, you let WW vote for you. That’s your choice of course, and is exactly what I suspect numerous other people did.
The new system gives great power to endorsers.
He made it to round 18 of 19. And until the local parking afficionado benefitted from the RCV process, he was in second to Wilson all the way through. Not sure that is losing badly, and if so, they literally everyone else lost worse.
“in second” is doing a lot of work there. He had no chance of catching up unless *miraculously* all of Rubios voters really also liked Gonzales. Makes no sense. He was losing and did lose badly.
John, PS:
These are the numbers. Gonzalez was never in 2nd place.
PS, what are you talking about? Your numbers are incorrect. Gonzalez got a shellacking, A humiliating loss. He never got a higher score than Rubio in any round, and received very few transfer votes.
About 18% of Portlanders ranked him their first choice — and that was pretty much it, until Mapps was eliminated in the final rounds, with about a third of those transfer votes going to Gonzalez. Mapps transfers brought him up to 25%, but even most of Mapps’s transfers went to Wilson and Rubio.
You can have an opinion, but making up facts is a no-no.
https://rcvresults.multco.us/Reports/a3df36c7-9b95-4614-a357-759ae2ca223f-City_of_Portland_Mayor
Apologies for the oversight, was looking at Preliminary Results 1. Appreciate the fact check.
Calling Rene Gonzalez a ‘Republican’ is just off-base. It seems like anyone with common-sense ideas around safety or accountability gets labeled that way. Rene’s focus has been on practical solutions that many Portlanders want, regardless of party lines. Smearing him with political labels instead of addressing his actual policies only pushes people further away from real discussions. Let’s keep it to the issues that impact all of us.”
How’s “former Republican who illegally used public money to edit his Wikipedia to reinforce his tenuous ties to the Democratic Party” then? Or would you prefer “guy who publicly agreed with a right wing provocateur who has made a career out of bashing Portland”?
He’s got bad policies, but he’s also a bad politician.
In my view he was the only councilor who stood up to the people who have consistently enabled dysfunction in our city – like JVP and her cronies on the county council. That counted for a lot, for me.
Is he perfect? No way. But your labels are just doing what Angus is warning against: they are lazy and they don’t advance the conversation.
Standing up to people in power is an important quality, but it depends on who’s standing up. And Rene’s choice to pick fights, dismiss the voices and concerns of some voters, and play to the far right base, show that he’s not a serious politician. Keith has some similar positions and inclinations as Rene does (Keith would also arrest homeless people and he’s strongly backed by business interests), but look how Keith communicates. Keith is respectful and he’s a team builder who understands we need the entire political spectrum of Portland to work together — not fighting from different camps — to tackle big problems. Rene went for populism in a strong-man type of way that was way too Trumpian and Portland voters were not swayed by it. Keith’s ability to master the center and do it with integrity and honesty obviously broke through and was the salve many people were hoping for.
“Standing up to people in power is an important quality, but it depends on who’s standing up.”
Yes. The principle of speaking out is important, but it only applies to our guys.
Abusing public office for personal political gain (in the Wikipedia scandal case) is disqualifying under all circumstances for a public official. And publicly agreeing with someone who makes a career out of bashing the city you are on the city council of is just stupid.
Those aren’t labels, they are examples of Rene Gonzalez being a bad politician.
It doesn’t disenfranchise voters. It’s unwieldy, complicated and expensive, but no one is losing their right to vote w/ RCV.
What’s the expense? That’s a new one I’ve never heard.
Seriously. I had no idea that running a simple Excel spreadsheet formula was so darn expensive! [sarcasm]
I don’t get the fanfare. For Mayor and all city council positions, there was no change from the first round to the end for who won. Maybe some, D4 for example, would have triggered a recount between 3rd and 4th place, but the net effect would have been the same. So what am I missing?
Are we really to the point where the populace likes seeing that their preferred candidate who likely just took public dollars to run a campaign to nowhere got 6% of the vote?
For one, it is valuable to see a concrete, fully representative record of what people think. No surveys or other polls could get you that kind of turnout. So it’s useful to see how far long shot candidates can get.
Furthermore, it doesn’t matter that there was no change from first round to the end for who won. We simply do not and can not know who would have won without RCV. The whole entire point of RCV is it allows voters to more accurately express their preferences. People who put someone at #1 would have very likely voted for somebody else in a first past the post system. All I have to go on is me, but I 100% would have voted for someone other than my #1 choice because I didn’t think my #1 choice had a chance at winning and there were other candidates who I wanted to prevent from winning.
Right, so it makes you feel good to know you can at least vote for people who have no chance of winning, then make up for it by voting for people who might, so that people you don’t like, don’t.
The idea we allocate public resources to this is insane.
If “accurately informing the public and elected officials of what kind of politics the voters want” makes me feel good, yes.
And again, what “public resources” are being spent on this? This system should SAVE MONEY! Not that that should be a top priority. We do one election instead of two whole entire rounds of ballots, campaigning, counting, all the overhead of a primary election.
If I had had to choose just one candidate, like in our old system, I would probably have voted for Rubio. Because it seemed to me like she was the most likely to win of the candidates that I liked “enough” to vote for them. So she was on my rankings. I thought it would be a close race between Rubio and Gonzales, and that Wilson would be somewhere in third.
I don’t know how many voters would have thought like me, because it’s impossible to know any minds other than my own (and even then it’s hard to be sure) – but there’s some good chance that with that system of voting, Rubio would have been elected instead of Wilson. At least that’s how I would have voted – because there was a candidate I *really* didn’t want to win.
This system allowed me to rank Wilson higher than Rubio, since I prefer him, even though I would have been OK with Rubio if Wilson was a long shot.
The system for me let me vote for two of the top contenders in order of preference instead of playing some mind game with other voters to try and divine the future, which would have been wrong and could have resulted in a worse outcome according to most people in Portland.
“This system should SAVE MONEY!”
It would be very easy to test this theory by comparing what this election cost to what the last one cost.
It would be equally easy for the Gish gallopers claiming this is going to cost so much money to provide evidence or test this theory too. They’re the ones making this baffling claim, they can come up with the evidence.
Which is sort of besides the point. If this costs a little more administratively (I don’t know how it costs money to run a spreadsheet), it’s worth it for the enormous benefit to democracy.
Didn’t worry, someone is going to do this analysis.
Whether the new system is an “enormous benefit to democracy” entirely depends how you weigh competing values.
It might seem like it didn’t matter, but it most likely had a big effect on how people voted, just by its existence. For example, without ranked-choice voting, more people may have voted for Gonzalez or Rubio as a strategic vote, based on perceptions of them being the “front-runners”. Most people want to vote for the winner, so there is a self-fulfilling prophecy that can happen with first-past-the-post. With RCV, I bet a bunch of people thought to themselves “hmm…I like Wilson more, and even if he might not win, I might as well rank him number 1 and rank one of the front-runners number 2”. Or they they ranked him number 2 and that helped him as well. Without RCV, I think people would have been less likely to vote according to how they actually felt, versus how they perceived everyone else was going to vote, which is largely based on the media coverage.
Nope – I’ll be voting to rescind STV and all other forms of RCV when it inevitably comes up for a vote one day soon.
It’s too complicated, too obtuse, and too difficult to interpret the results. In a time when people need to REBUILD trust in gov’t institutions, RCV reduces that trust. That factor alone is enough to rescind it.
Some people would vote to lose the option to vote if it was on the ballot.
RCV is factually a more accurate representation of what people want than what we had before. It is not complicated to do. Very easy to understand.
The only time it will give bad results is people used to first past the post trying to game it badly. Vote your preference and it will give good results.
I guess I’ll have to take your word for it, John. But that’s all I have: your assurances that it’s better.
You remind me of the great Richard Pryor: “Who you gonna trust: me or your lyin’ eyes?”
What I see with my own eyes isn’t reassuring. Even the folks at Willamette Week, who spent many hours trying to understand STV, said they didn’t fully understand it.
And look at the council results in the various “rounds”: every candidate except the top three has zero votes! That can’t be right.
You can’t TELL me it’s better; you need to SHOW me. And so far no one has been able to show me.
Yeah, I too keep hearing, primarily in these forums but not elsewhere, how awesome it is, but no one is able to quantify why it is.
I was open to the idea, but after seeing my ballot and then the convoluted tabulation process, I knew it was a bad idea for elections.
One person, one vote, candidate with most votes wins. How does RCV improve on that?
I get it, some folk’s candidates didn’t win in previous elections and so they are trying to game the system so they’ll do better. Sounds like what another group of people has been doing primarily in the South and we know we’d never want to be like them!
The new system literally is one person, one vote, candidate with the most votes wins.
The reason the new system is better is that it actually elects the most preferred option. It flatly gives better results. I think there is a good possibility that Wilson would not have won in the previous system, but given these results he was clearly the most preferred in a landslide. That right there is an obvious win for RCV.
“It’s too complicated, too obtuse, and too difficult to interpret the results.”
I think the results are clear enough — we know who won and who lost without any doubt, but I do think simplicity and transparency are more important values than the ability to express your nuanced preferences through the ballot.
Like anything, each system has tradeoffs, and reasonable people can disagree on what those should be.
I’m a big fan of RCV, glad we have it and sad it lost state-wide. The process was straight-forward, and the results are representative of Portlander’s preferences. It takes a bit of extra effort to figure out who your top 6 choices are versus picking one, but democracy is worth it. Simply filling in the oval because they have the appropriate letter behind their name is lazy and uninformed participation. Voters should educate themselves on the candidates or issues or sit it out. An uninformed or misinformed populace is why we have so many problems.
“sad it lost state-wide”
Maybe now that we’ve tried RCV, people will want to expand it.
So when working class and immigrant voters who have lower reading speeds and weaker reading comprehension (at least judging by standardized tests) follow your advice and sit it out–is that a good result?
Aapano and Coalition of Communities of Color have a weak mandate to speak for these populations as they don’t conduct statistically sound canvassing of populations they purport to serve. They are instead responsive to funding sources extrinsic to the community (usually government grants which award funding based on a variety of factors).
For example, those who purport to speak for low income communities in East Portland often hold views on policing that are not widely held. Voting records are what prove the disconnect so that policy makers can respond to what the actual community wants.
I’m not sure grandstanding “poor people can’t read well” puts you on quite the moral high ground you think it does.
Yeah well they cant and so no, a complicated ballot disenfranchises them. Do you disagree?
Were these weak readers strongly represented in the primary elections, where most races were decided, under the old system?
Most races were decided in the primaries? Not in Portland they weren’t.
No, JBee – you aren’t telling the whole story here. What we used to have were run-off elections. Political parties would have a run-off to determine who was their best candidate to put forward in the general election. The candidates battled it out in the primary and then in the general election we could decide which party had the candidate we wanted to vote for. It was one person, one vote, and everyone understood how it worked.
Now you have too many choices to make sense of your ballot, and the entire process of reaching a solution is impenetrable (when you get more than 25% your votes are redistributed? Why and which ones?). Before I could look at a limited number of serious candidates in my party and decide on the best one; now I have an array of candidates I can’t possibly learn enough about.
RCV basically tells people: “You won’t be able to be an informed voter but that’s okay cuz your vote doesn’t really matter so just give us a VIBE for what you want and we’ll figure it out for you.” Truly that’s what it feels like to me.
I voted for charter reform b/c we HAD to do something to address the dysfunction of commission-style gov’t. But we weren’t given a choice about whether or not we wanted RCV – it was presented as a package so if you wanted change you had to take RCV. Now that I have experienced RCV, I don’t like it and I’ll be working to go back to the former way of voting.
“Why and which ones.” This has all been explained over and over, I’m not doing it again. But it does seem like you don’t want to know. I’ve explained it 3 or 4 times in BP posts.
The tables coming out every night show that voters were actually well-informed. Who their votes transferred to was consistent politically with which candidate the votes transferred from. I even show how that worked in this article — it’s the whole point of the article!
The tables show that simple rankings would have produced the same result in each race. I don’t think you have any empirical evidence that voters were well-informed based on these trivial results.
As for people’s claimed knowledge, I think often Dunning-Kruger applies. STV RCV is a complex voting system and can result in weird results that would be very difficult for a “knowledgeable” voter to forsee.
And if the best one got 75% of the vote, of a three representative election? You wasted your vote and have no say on the other two. The other quarter of the population gets to decide on 2/3 of the representatives. Sounds like a bad system you’re proposing! Good thing STV redistributes that 50% of the votes to their second choice!
You’re no less informed than any other primary election. A runoff may allow someone else to narrow down the options for you, but this is no worse than the first round of any election we always had. Especially since the positions are non-partisan (allegedly)!
“this is no worse than the first round of any election we always had”
Turnout was down, despite the historic nature of the election and the extreme nature of people’s opinions about the candidates.
First round of elections always attract fewer voters. Perhaps there is a connection in there somewhere.
Turnout was down everywhere by millions of votes, across both parties, and they didn’t have RCV on the ballot. This was not an enthusiastic election.
How was turnout in places that detested Donald Trump? Those would be a better comparison than places where voters were more ambivalent.
Fingers crossed RCV voting goes the way of my questionable fashion choices from 2012—gone and never coming back!
Something I just want to add to the discussion about RCV:
To all the repeal heads out there who are so excited to repeal it next chance you get, I’ve got some bad news for you. The RCV measure failed state wide, but it passed in a landslide in Multnomah County.
Turns out, fortunately, your neighbors prefer improved democracy.
Or maybe they didn’t realize it’d turn out to be such a sh*t show and they may change their minds come time to repeal.
After all it doesn’t “improve democracy” at all. It wasn’t broke to begin with.
If you don’t think it was broke before, you aren’t paying any attention. FPTP is a horrible system that gives horrible results.
I think this part is a key point that is easy to overlook. FPTP is dead-simple and everyone can understand it, but the problems with it take a little more explanation to really get. The explanations aren’t super complicated, but you do have to convince people to listen to them. All that is to say that I understand why people are skeptical of electoral reform that introduces complexity even when it leads to better outcomes.
I like ranked-choice voting. Like anything new, it will take time for people to get used to it.
“Portland’s ranked-choice debut causes voter engagement to crater”
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2024/11/portlands-ranked-choice-debut-causes-voter-engagement-to-crater-1-in-5-who-cast-ballots-chose-no-one-for-city-council.html
Causality wasn’t established.
Can you offer any alternative hypothesizes we should consider?
Hey Watts,
It didn’t offer any regional or historical context. What I would have liked to have read (and what I don’t know) is what effect automatic voter registration with a drivers license has had on the turnout percentage over the past 8 years. Is there a trend (the denominator is probably getting bigger, does it dampen the turnout result?). I also have had a theory for months that a subset of Trump voters wouldn’t turn out if it didn’t look certain he was going to win. There was noticeably less Trump signage and exuberance in OR than in 2016. Did that dampen the R vote in some quarters? Who didn’t vote? Ds? Rs? frequent voters?
Also, the most important result of the city council election is that we arrived at a council with half women, even though only about 25% of the candidates were female. Wow, wow, wow. And it happened in a year in which the Republican party promoted the most vulgar misogyny. That’s the most important story.
A lot went right about our first shot with STV, but I expect a steady stream of negativity from Oregonian/Kavanaugh. The paper wants to demonstrate that they were right in being against the charter reform changes from the get-go.
Sure, there is a lot more to analyze. This was only a first take. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
I didn’t say the numbers were wrong, I said they didn’t establish causality.
I agree that at this stage, very little is established. In my opinion, the initial read is probably right, but it’s still early days.
I asked about your interpretations because I can’t think of any reasonable alternatives.
The Oregonian had a really good article over the weekend which discusses, among other things, the difference between registered and eligible voters, and Oregon’s adoption of automatic registration about 8 years ago:
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2024/11/oregon-voter-turnout-trails-historic-levels.html
It makes the point that,
I really believe people thought it was a good idea (you know, slap the label social justice on something and it’ll get voted in) when it was first voted on, but once people received their convoluted ballots, had to wade through the book of candidates, and then find that after many days we still didn’t know the results of one of the races it was really a bad idea.
RCV was obviously a major mistake in an attempt to fix something that wasn’t broken (sorry your candidates didn’t win in the past). All we had to do in the districts was vote for 3. Then the votes could have been tallied and that night known who the winners were because the top 3 would win. But no, we have an overly complex “transfer” (aka steal) votes around that isn’t understandable by the majority of voters.
REPEAL RCV NOW!