Multnomah County certified the 2024 election results Dec. 2, punctuating a long process that saw the implementation of Portland’s first-ever ranked choice voting, or RCV, and a new form of city government determined by four newly drawn districts. Despite high election anxiety nationally and locally, broad disinformation campaigns, and an early morning fire started by an incendiary device left in a ballot box outside local election offices — the actual vote tally was nothing to write home about.
“Boring is about as good as you can get in bureaucracy,” Leah Benson, Multnomah County Elections ranked choice voting project manager, said.
Before ballots even went out, some elected officials and critics of RCV argued the method was too confusing, particularly as multiple changes to the voting structure took place in the same election year. Experts argued that with an attentive push to educate voters, RCV and the new district map would lead to improved representation for neighborhoods long ignored by City Hall.
Facilitating changes in two Portland systems at once was a monumental undertaking. After 58% of Portland voters approved Measure 26-228 in 2022, enacting RCV in future citywide elections, the county immediately started working on internal procedures to implement the process, according to Benson. That included updating the voting system software to align with intensive federal processes meant to ensure voting systems accurately reflect vote tallies.
The county also had to design new ballots, conduct new accuracy testing to independently verify votes, and devise a new way of hand-counting ballots in case a close race ultimately triggered a recount. Oregon law requires an automatic recount in the instance of a tie or if the difference in votes between two candidates is within .002% of the total votes cast for both candidates.
Benson said advance planning and practice runs set the election up for success, meaning there were no surprises when the county officially began counting votes. In July, the county embarked on a massive hand recount of 5,000 test ballots in the basement of the county elections office. Elections officials invited workers from cities across the country already using RCV and from local and state jurisdictions to hand count ballots and produce results identical to those reflected in the software. It was an important landmark in the journey.
“It really made us feel even more confident that everything was there because we were able to verify it in just about every way possible,” Benson said.
The hand recount also helped elections officials break down the math, counting and transferring voters’ choices in Portland’s RCV system. Benson acknowledged it would take time for voters to learn a new style of voting but said while it may appear complicated, the system doesn’t require a supercomputer to accurately reflect voters’ preferences.
“For all of us, it’s going to be a different experience,” Benson said. “But from the back end, it’s a massive amount of organization to be able to count the ballots, but the actual math that contributes to it is not that complex.”
Sincerity over strategy
Proponents of RCV say the system allows people to vote sincerely rather than strategically.
Strategic voting occurs when a person does not vote for, say, a third-party candidate they like because they believe that candidate cannot win — commonly referred to as the “lesser of two evils” approach in a two-party system. On the other hand, sincere voting occurs when a person votes for the candidate they prefer, regardless of their viability.
“Sincere voting makes people feel better about the democracy,” Melody Valdini, Portland State University political science professor, told Street Roots. “It makes people feel like their actual voices are being heard.”
In 2023, Valdini was appointed to the city’s Independent District Commission, a nonpartisan commission responsible for drafting the city’s new, equally distributed district lines. Her research interrogates the consequences of institutional design (the process of structuring institutions within a political system), and she focuses on electoral systems, political parties and gender stereotypes in politics.
She said due to RCV and other changes in local elections, this year was the first opportunity for Portlanders to elevate leaders across a broad ideological spectrum — something she helped facilitate in collaboration with colleagues and local community members.
When embarking on the process of drawing the new map, the committee immediately recognized its fundamental responsibility to change Portland’s long pattern of underrepresenting certain areas of the city, according to Valdini.
The previous status quo citywide elections commonly produced winning candidates of relatively similar ideological bents and produced very few low-income electeds or people of color.
That means elected officials and powerful political entities may have reason to push back on the switch to RCV.
“Those who were elected and those who have power through the old system are going to resist change,” Valdini said. “That’s a very rational thing for them to do, you know — they’ve won in this old system.”
A central purpose of the process was to draw maps that would allow for a diversity of thought from neighborhoods across the entire city.
“We saw the importance of that right away and really acted on it, and then the rest of it just sort of fell into place,” Valdini said.
The commission did not create the new district maps behind closed doors. Valdini said the committee repeatedly met with community members in different neighborhoods throughout the process to hear concerns and explain why certain decisions benefitted all residents. That engagement proved worthwhile, as the incoming City Council is more demographically and ideologically diverse than prior administrations, characteristic of the city’s estimated 640,000 residents.
“To get that level of ideological diversity in the council is just fantastic because it shows that the system is representing the diversity of opinions around the city, and that’s something that our previous electoral system and our previous at large single district never did,” Valdini said.
Portland’s first RCV election with new district lines ensured voters in long-forgotten neighborhoods could elect leaders to advocate for policies that meet their needs. Historically, for instance, neighborhoods in what is now known as District 1 have enjoyed few representatives from the area in City Hall.
In 2025, District 1 residents will have three city councilors on a 12-member council, potentially securing funding for much-needed affordable housing projects, transportation upgrades and public safety resources.
Valdini said similar to any effort toward a more inclusive democracy, it may take time for residents to internalize the importance of having three City Council members working to bring public projects into their neighborhoods.
“The thing that I really hope people keep in mind is that it improves dramatically over time,” Valdini said. “So, this election is the worst it’s ever going to be. In the future, there are going to be incumbents, so there are going to be people who are already representing that district. It’ll be a much easier vote.”
In theory, there are some notable challenges with RCV. There is a correlation between lower-income communities and fewer candidate rankings, meaning low-income voters are more likely to exhaust their ballots, according to Valdini.
Ballot exhaustion means a voter does not rank a candidate for every available rank on the ballot. For instance, a Portland voter can rank up to six candidates, but some voters may only rank two or three, leaving their final three or four blank. The blank circles are therefore “exhausted.” A ballot is also considered exhausted if candidates ranked lower have been disqualified in earlier rounds, therefore no longer contributing to the total vote. Researchers, including Valdini, continue to further investigate why low-income voters are more likely to submit exhausted ballots and what other factors may exist.
In a study titled “An Examination of Ranked-Choice Voting in the United States, 2004-2022,” mathematic scientists Adam Graham-Squire and David McCune analyzed many of the common arguments against RCV elections. With certain jurisdictions implementing RCV, including Alaska in 2022, New York City in 2021 and Maine in 2018, they studied a database of 185 single-winner ranked-choice elections to see how often certain theoretical deficiencies occur in actual elections.
The study looked into common concerns scholars raise with RCV, including its susceptibility to the spoiler effect (when a group of losing candidates ultimately changes the winner of the election). Scholars also warn of RCV’s potential failure to elect majority candidates due to ballot exhaustion and a potential failure to elect the candidate who would win a majority of votes in a head-to-head contest (known as the Condorcet winner).
The study aimed to examine how often those theoretical issues occur in real-world elections. It found that RCV mostly performs well in practice, despite concerns raised by scholars.
“In the American ranked-choice political elections in our database, RCV almost always selects the Condorcet winner and avoids the spoiler effect while also demonstrating practical resistance to strategic voting,” the study said.
However, the study also noted the percentage of elections in which the winner does not receive a majority in the final round is very high, saying that factor should give RCV advocates pause.
In other words, leaders are often elected with less than 50% of votes — hardly a mandate for their policy goals. Still, the study highlighted how infrequently most other downsides occur.
“Since a perfect voting method seemingly does not exist, choosing a method involves trade-offs,” the study said. “… The weaknesses of RCV are mostly not observed in real-world ranked-choice data available in the U.S.”
As the study alluded to, other voting processes also include deficiencies. The American single-member district system, for instance, effectively only allows for two parties and third-party votes are often considered spoiler candidates.
“I see those systems that restrict representation by design as being way more dangerous than systems that kind of ask voters to do more,” Valdini said.
While some scholars are genuinely and credibly concerned with various aspects of RCV, Valdini said long-term education efforts typically increase voter confidence and turnout.
“They’re really worried that it’s going to be an inadvertent disenfranchisement,” she said. “And I get that. I can see why they’re worried about that, but to me, just the fact that things get better over time makes me less concerned about that.”
Preliminary results show that District 1 had the lowest turnout of the four districts in the 2024 election, both for City Council and mayoral races. Average participation in District 1 was 54%, compared to 69% in District 2, 68% in District 3, and 65% in District 4, according to analysis from nonprofit North Star Civic’s Stumptown Stats project, which tracks changes in Portland’s new form of government. District 1 is also the lowest-income district and contains the highest percentage of residents of color.
“When you just ignore a group, an area of the city, systematically for years and years and years, and then all of a sudden say, ‘Okay, now we’re representing you,’ it takes a while for them to register that and for the culture to shift,” Valdini said. “We see this in other countries all the time.”
When democracy is introduced to a place that has not historically been democratic, it can take time for turnout to rise because people are not yet conditioned to believe their voices matter, according to Valdini.
“The political culture needs time to shift,” Valdini said.
Moving forward
As the new City Council convenes in January, the 12 city councilors and Mayor-elect Keith Wilson will have to work together to normalize the new form of government. RCV allowed some of the elected candidates to work in harmony rather than engaging in negative campaigning, bridging ideological gaps in the interest of more collaborative public service. Valdini said that is a feature of RCV that many advocates celebrate.
“You don’t want to alienate someone else’s voters, so you don’t want to go after someone too negatively,” Valdini said.
In other forms of elections, candidates often carry negative feelings by the time they officially take office, but RCV necessitates a spirit of cooperation.
“It kind of sets the representatives up then, for successful compromises and successful teamwork,” Valdini said.
Despite the early anxieties, concerns of cratering turnout, and some elected officials’ lack of faith in the populace, Portland did, in fact, elect a dozen new city councilors across difference, paving the way for the city’s future.
“It’s just really exciting to see that finally, we have a council that is actually reflecting the diversity of ideology in Portland,” Valdini said.
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This article appears in December 4, 2024.