Tag Archives: RCV

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Portland City Council Voters: Do You Know What You Did?

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

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

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

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

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

This is how the RCV reform proposal described the system: 

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

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

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

And that’s exactly what happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Portland’s Next Mayor? Who Cares?

Portland’s Next Mayor?

In all the turmoil and media attention focused on Portland’s new ranked choice voting election in November, much of the focus has been on the contest for mayor.[1]

Why?

The next mayor is going to be a eunuch. No, I don’t mean a castrated man. I mean the word metaphorically, in the sense an ineffectual or powerless person.

It’s the new 12-person City Council that will have the power to enact laws. The new mayor won’t even sit on the City Council or vote on council items (except to break a tie).  The mayor, and the new city administrator, who will be appointed by the mayor with council approval, will be in charge of carrying out City Council actions and crafting the city budget.

The mayor will also be tasked with appointing a city administrator, city attorney, and police chief, but that will also be only with the City Council’s approval. And to top it all off, the mayor won’t have veto power over council decisions. 

The mayor will serve more as a $175,463-a-year figurehead than a legislator, Tate White, a member of the city’s government transition team, told OPB earlier this year. “They’re going to be partnering with other jurisdictions, they’ll be standing at press conferences, they’re going to be the people meeting with representatives from sister cities when they come and visit, it will be far more ceremonial,” she said.

But don’t count on the new 12-person City Council, with three representatives per four new geographical districts and only one staff person for each City Council member, to be all that cooperative, efficient or effective. It might be more functional than New York City’s 51-member City Council, but likely not much. After all, a City Council member can be elected with as little as 25% + 1 votes, so their constituencies will be pretty damn small.[2] One consequence could be a Councilor able to remain in office by consistently satisfying just that smaller segment of eligible voters.

Jeff Jacoby, an award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe, calls the ranked choice voting process “democracy on the Rube Goldberg model”, where  ideas that supposedly simplify people’s lives wreak havoc instead.

[1] Mayoral candidates include three current members of Portland City Council: Rene Gonzalez, Mingus Mapps and Carmen Rubio. Others running are: Saadiq Ali, early childhood educator Shei’Meka As-Salaam, inventor James Atkinson IV, REAP youth advocate Durrell Kinsey Bey, financial advisor Nancy Congdon, Yao Jun He, advocate for the unhoused and community activist Michael O’Callaghan, artist and performer Liv Osthus, city hall veteran and green energy advocate Marshall Runkel, owner and president of TITAN Freight Systems Keith Wilson and maintenance supervisor Dustin Witherspoon. 

[2] Charter reform’s explanation of how “single transferable vote” (STV) will work: 

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

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Portland’s Charter Reform Proposal: An Elaborate, Unworkable Mess

Proponents of Portland’s charter reform proposal (Measure 26-228) try to make it sound so simple and straightforward; just a good government initiative that will transform the city.

Not so. The proposed radical change in how city officials would be elected is a convoluted jumble that few probably comprehend. 

The current system is simple: the person with the most votes wins.

Under the reform proposal, not one but two voting systems would be employed. 

First, the Mayor and the Auditor would be elected at-large using a flawed method of ranked choice voting (RCV) known as instant runoff voting.

This is how the reform proposal describes the system: 

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

Got that? 

In RCV, voters need to have a high level of information about all the candidates in order to choose preferences. You can’t just vote for the person and ideas you like. You must also educate yourself about all the other candidates in order to elevate, or dismiss, the ones you don’t. 

If you only vote for the candidate you prefer and don’t rank all the rest, you are effectively disenfranchised if your candidate doesn’t come in first in the initial ballot count.

The fact is, the more people a voter ranks the longer a ballot works for the voter. If there are five people on a ballot, you vote for only one and that one is eliminated in the instant runoff, your ballot is exhausted and has no impact on the race. It simply won’t factor into the final outcome.

On the other hand, pressure to rank all the candidates can lead to support for somebody you really don’t like. In RCV, your vote for a candidate you dislike can actually help that candidate move up. 

Jeff Jacoby, an award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe, calls the RCV process “democracy on the Rube Goldberg model”, where  ideas that supposedly simplify people’s lives wreak havoc instead.

“Perversely, (ranked choice voting) enhances the influence of the candidate who comes in last when the ballots are first counted, by shifting that candidate’s voters to their second choice.,” Jacoby says. “Just as perversely, the system pushes voters to decide on who their third-, fourth-, and even fifth-favorite candidates are — or face the prospect of their vote being nullified if multiple rounds of tallying are required.”

Things get even weirder when you apply RCV to an election for multiple positions.

As noted earlier, not one but two voting systems would be employed under Portland’s charter reform proposal. In the races for mayor and auditor, there would be only one final winner in each. In the district council races, each of four districts would be electing three Councilors to create a 12-member city council, guaranteed to lead to gridlock at times because of the even number.. 

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

Under this system, a candidate running for a seat in a multimember district could win a position on the Council with as little as 25% + 1 of the vote. One consequence could be a Councilor able to remain in office by consistently satisfying just that smaller segment of eligible voters.

Because STV is a complex system, understanding it demands a high degree of literacy and numeracy. It can also heighten the power of small minority coalitions and fragment political parties because it can cause members of a party to compete against each other as well as against their ideological opponents.

Although organizations such as the City Club of Portland, the League of Women Voters of Portland and the ACLU of Oregon have endorsed the reform proposal, it’s hard to understand why given that its complexity potentially endangers its legitimacy in the eyes of the general public.

Charter reform proponents cite a Portland Governance & Electoral Reform Survey conducted in March 2022 by Baltimore, MD-based GBAO, which does survey research and strategic consulting for Democratic and progressive campaigns, that showed strong support for RCV and multimember districts.

The polling questions did not, however, explain the intricacies of how RCV would work with multimember districts and application of the single transferable vote concept.

Probably realizing that all this is confusing as hell, the charter reform proposal calls for voter education. “The City must conduct periodic voter education campaigns to familiarize voters with the ranked choice voting methods described above,” the proposal says.

Try explaining all this in a 30-second tv spot, a tweet or a digital ad.

Good luck with that.

__________

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

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

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Portland’s Proposed Ranked Choice Voting Reform Isn’t The Solution To Portland’s Dysfunction

Portland’s current government is a mess, for a lot of reasons.

In November, Portland voters will have an opportunity to vote on one proposed solution, presented as the following question: “Should City Administrator, supervised by Mayor, manage Portland with twelve Councilors representing four districts making laws and voters ranking candidates?”

Portland’s City Council now consists of a mayor and four commissioners, all of them elected at-large, with all of Portland’s voters eligible to vote in the race for each seat.

The proposal from Portland’s Charter Commission would remove the mayor from the council and expand the council to 12 members, three each from four geographic districts of equal population, each of which would be elected using ranked choice voting. An independent commission would determine the four district boundaries after the vote on the ballot question. 

With only 8% of Portland voters saying the city is headed in the right direction and 82% of Multnomah County residents being either somewhat or very worried about the future of their part of the state. there may be an inclination to support a radical change out of sheer frustration. But the commission’s solution isn’t the answer.

Expanding the City Council to 12 members is likely to make it more unwieldy, not less. Though, thankfully, the Charter Commission was somewhat restrained, not choosing an even bigger expansion, such as the 51-member City Council with which New York City is blessed.

The particular weakness of the commission’s proposal, though, is its reliance on a needlessly complex new system of ranked choice voting (RCV). In setting on this proposal, the Charter Commission shows itself to have been populated by naive zealots advocating change for change’s sake.

There are lot of ways to organize and count votes. Most of us are used to the simple proposition that the person with the most votes wins. 

“This system is the norm from grade school elections for class president to congressional elections, “Jeff Gill and Jason wrote in a Statistical Science article about voting. “However, not only is this merely one of many possible “democratic” procedures. it is also not the only system currently used in political life in the United States and around the world.”

RCV is one of those voting options.

In RCV, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If there are a lot of candidates, as there might be under the Charter Commission’s proposal, voters need to have a high level of information about all of them in order to choose preferences. You can’t just vote for the person and ideas you like. You must also educate yourself about all the other candidates in order to elevate, or dismiss, the ones you don’t.

Voters in RCV can identify their first choice, the next best and so on as they work their way down the list. If one of the candidates gets more than 50% of the first-choice votes in the first count, that candidate wins. If nobody gets a majority, there’s an “instant runoff” where the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and voters who had chosen that candidate as their first choice have their second choice counted instead. This process continues until one of the candidates gets more than half of the vote. 

Yep, it’s complicated. Too complicated. And prone to undesireable results.

For example, don’t assume RCV will always select a majority winner. In cases of what’s called “ballot exhaustion,” a voter’s preferences are eliminated so none of them are carried forward. In other words, the candidate who ends up with a majority of votes is elected with only the remaining ballots, rather than all the original ballots, meaning a winner can have fewer than half the votes of the original ballots.

The Center for Election Science says RCV’s weakness is particularly noticeable in competitive elections where more than two candidates have significant support. 

The center cited a Louisiana election in which there were three candidates. The vote mainly split between the three candidates, but it led to the elimination of the more moderate candidate who would have won in a two-candidate race against either of the other two. That sent the two more controversial candidates to the second round. 

“…with competitive elections there’s a tendency to squeeze out the center candidate,” the Center said, “which would favor more extreme candidates …”

There are even situations with RCV where ranking a candidate higher can hurt that candidate and ranking a candidate lower can help that candidate. This occurrence, happened in a 2009 election in Burlington, VT.

There, conservatives ranked their favorite candidate first and it got them their least favorite candidate as the winner. Had these conservative voters instead tactically placed their favorite candidate as second, then they would have gotten a much better outcome.

Bear with me as I explain. 

In the 2009 Burlington mayoral race, there were five candidates. The counts resulted in the following:

1st Round2nd Round3rd Round (Final)
Kiss (Progressive)2585 (29%)29814313
Wright (Republican)2951 (33%)32944061
Montroll (Democrat)2063 (23%)2554
Smith (Independent)1306 (15%)
Simpson (Green)35 (0.4%)
Write-Ins36 (0.4%)
Votes in Burlington, VT Mayoral election

According to the preferences stated by the voters on their ballots, however, if Democrat Montroll had gone head-to-head with either Progressive Kiss or Republican Wright (or anybody else) in a two-man race, he would be mayor. 

Montroll would have been favored over Wright 56% to 44% (a 930-vote margin) and over Kiss 54% to 46% (590-vote margin), majorities in both cases. 

In other words, in voting terminology, Montroll was a “beats-all winner” and a fairly convincing one. However, in this RCV election, Montroll came in third! And Kiss beat Wright in the final RCV round with 51.5% (252-vote official margin).

Confusing, yes, but real.

Another troublesome and risky situation can arise if a voter’s preferred candidate is neither a clear loser nor a clear winner. In such a case, ranking your favorite as first risks getting a bad candidate elected. And that bad candidate gets elected by RCV eliminating a superior compromise candidate too early.

Voters in this in-between state can either rank their favorite first and risk a bad candidate winning or not rank their favorite first, depriving that candidate of  much-needed support. Both of these outcomes are bad.

RCV can also founder when voters, because they are unfamiliar with all the candidates or simply by choice, vote only for their preferred candidate, ignoring the opportunity to rank the rest. 

The fact is, the more people a voter ranks the longer a ballot works for the voter. If there are five people on a ballot, you vote for only one and that one is eliminated in the instant runoff, your ballot is exhausted and has no impact on the race. It simply won’t factor into the final outcome.

On the other hand, pressure to rank all the candidates can lead to support for somebody the voter despises. In RCV, your vote for a candidate you hate can help that candidate move up. 

The fact is RCV is a solution in search of a problem. It’s simply too complex and unwieldy for voters to be asked to vote it up or down as part of a wide-ranging rearrangement of Portland’s city government.

Vote “No” on the Charter Commission’s proposal on the November 8, 2022 ballot..