Today, Portlanders have an opportunity to weigh in on the options.
NOTE: On March 10, the Charter Commission is hosting unlimited public comment on its process and the reforms they’ve been considering – that’s today! Everyone who signs up will get three minutes to testify to the commission and have their voice heard in this once-in-a-decade public discussion. Community members can sign up here to give spoken testimony this evening or submit written testimony at any time here.
For over a year, Portland’s Charter Commission has listened to public input and researched different reforms to the city’s form of government and election system. The window for thorough public discussion of City Charter reforms like these only opens once a decade, giving the commission a rare chance to make Portland’s government more representative of its diverse city, more accountable to constituents, and more responsive in providing city services.
With these goals in mind, the commission has arrived at three broad agreements and is looking for public input in hashing out the details.
- First, the City Council should have more members, all of whom should represent districts rather than the city as a whole.
- Next, public officials should be elected using a method that only takes one election to yield final results and that captures multiple preferences from voters.
- Finally, councilors should stick to lawmaking and stop stretching themselves thin by also running city agencies.
These proposals are a great start and have real potential to increase community trust in their elected leaders and city staff. They’ll form the backbone of possible ballot measures that voters would consider in November.
But before the commission can send any decisions off to the City Attorney to draft actual ballot measures, they need to resolve some key remaining questions. On Thursday night, the public has one of its last opportunities to weigh in on these and other questions before the Charter Commission sets these proposals in stone. After this month there will only be a few details to tinker with and a simple yes/no vote on the draft proposals. Then it’ll be another 10 years before a new Charter Commission can consider a major change to the organization and selection of Portland’s government.
Question 1: Who gets to be represented on the City Council?
Right now, Portland’s winner-take-all election system means that every seat on the City Council is controlled by the same set of voters: white people, residents of the wealthy west side and inner east side, and homeowners. Most Americans are accustomed to winner-take-all systems, where candidates with the most votes win. But it’s a crude method when used for multi-seat bodies like councils because it allows a bare majority of voters to control all the seats in a governing body. (Indeed, many other developed countries have abandoned winner-take-all election systems or never implemented them in the first place.) Meanwhile, the rest of the voters, who may make up a significant part of the population, have a disproportionately low level of representation. This is a huge part of why people of color, East Portlanders, and renters have been historically underrepresented at City Hall. Winner-take-all elections mean that too many Portlanders don’t have a councilor who understands their concerns, responds to their needs, or represents their opinions during policymaking.
Winner-take-all elections mean that too many Portlanders don’t have a councilor who understands their concerns, responds to their needs, or represents their opinions during policymaking.
Multi-member districts, which the commission is considering, can elect councilors proportionally to their support in the community. Say that 25 percent of voters in a district support a candidate that speaks to their specific concerns. In a district that elects four councilors, that candidate can win one of the available seats, leaving three for the other 75 percent of voters, instead of being locked out entirely. This satisfies more voters, who can see somebody they actually voted for on the City Council fighting for their issues.
A proportionally elected City Council would look like a microcosm of the political views across the entire city, rather than just amplifying the voices of the same voters over and over again. And the more representatives that we elect from within each district, the better those representatives reflect the true viewpoints of their constituents. It’s impossible for one councilor to represent the broad political spectrum of any district, but a reasonable number, say four or five, would give residents multiple voices to carry their diverse opinions. More councilors from each district would also virtually eliminate the impact of gerrymandering, because voters in the political minority of any district still get to elect candidates in proportion to their share of the population. Unlike single-member districts, it’s extremely hard to gerrymander a multi-member district to lock some voters out of power without increasing their representation in surrounding districts.
The graphic above illustrates these effects. Even though green and yellow voters are in the minority in their districts, they still get to elect one candidate in proportion to their strength. And moving district boundaries around to weaken red voters in one district would just strengthen red voters in another district. Because winner-take-all districts mean candidates with less than 50 percent support get nothing, it’s feasible to shift boundaries around to keep some groups of voters under that 50 percent threshold across several districts. But when voters get to elect candidates proportionally to their levels of support, moving enough blue voters out of one district to remove a blue representative just means that the district next door adds a blue representative—but it’s much harder to keep blue under a threshold of 25 percent or 20 percent across the board. Multi-member districts would mean that voters, not district lines, decide who gets to be on the City Council.
Multi-member districts would mean that voters, not district lines, decide who gets to be on the City Council.
Multi-member districts would give better representation to community members in every corner of the city, meaning that more Portlanders have an elected official they voted for and can trust to champion their concerns on the City Council. By electing more councilors in each district, we can make City Hall more reflective of the diverse political views and communities across Portland.
The commission is also considering single-member districts. But that’s simply another flavor of winner-take-all that would lead to the same outcomes we have now.1 Because communities of color, renters, and other non-majority groups are spread across the city, single-member districts would continue to prevent them from electing candidates of their choice. There might be a chance for one renter-favored candidate if one district is centered around downtown, but renters in the rest of the city wouldn’t have anybody to represent their needs. It’s even worse for people of color, who are spread so evenly across the city that it’s impossible to draw any district where they would make up a majority and be able to elect their candidate of choice. And single-member districts wouldn’t even guarantee fair representation for East Portlanders, who could still be gerrymandered out of the majority in a district by grouping them with wealthier and whiter residents of the inner east side.
Question 2: Which election system lets more Portlanders vote honestly?
Portland’s current election rules have more than their fair share of issues. Sometimes candidates are elected to citywide office despite most voters opposing them. If they want to avoid this, voters have to make strategic calculations about who they think can win instead of just voting for who they honestly want to win. Almost 70 percent of City Council races are decided by a smaller, older, whiter primary electorate before half of voters ever weigh in, which means that councilors don’t represent the entire city and many Portlanders don’t trust them to understand their needs.
To overcome these issues, the Charter Commission is considering a move to a single election using ranked choice voting. Voters can pick their true favorite first and fill out the rest of the ballot without worrying that they’ll hurt their first choice or that their vote will be “wasted” on a candidate that might not be a strong contender.2 Ranked choice voting can also lead to more civil campaigns, because candidates can benefit from the second- and third-choice votes of their opponents’ supporters. It can also prevent extreme candidates from gaining power, because it stops polarizing candidates from winning a primary or general election in a crowded field where their opposition is divided. And ranked choice voting would let Portland run City Council races in just one election, without having to also use an expensive, low-turnout primary election to narrow down a large field of candidates.
The City Council could actually reflect the diverse views of Portlanders if voters are able to vote honestly for the candidates and policies they want to see in City Hall. And because they aren’t shoehorned into voting for candidates they don’t prefer, voters can actually hold these candidates accountable even if they think the candidates are too popular to lose or the lesser of two evils. Portland could join the 100 places around the country that have already adopted or are moving to ranked choice voting, including Benton County, Oregon, and Alaska.
If the commission does not choose ranked choice voting (RCV), it would likely opt for Score Then Automatic Runoff voting (STAR voting). Unlike RCV, STAR is an untested system with a much lower potential to meaningfully address the flaws in Portland’s elections. Voters are strongly incentivized not to score any other candidates, which would put Portlanders right back in their current pick-one trap. While no voting system is without its flaws, RCV has a clear advantage over STAR for Portlanders because it won’t spiral back down to the current pick-one election system. Maybe further testing will show that STAR can overcome this major issue, but one of America’s major cities isn’t the place to be experimenting with it. Instead, RCV offers voters a proven system that lets them genuinely express their preferences and elect candidates that represent the ideas they want to see in City Hall.
Question 3: If the City Council isn’t running bureaus, who is?
Hundreds of Portlanders have shared with the commission some of the problems with a government where elected officials hold legislative roles while also running city bureaus in the executive branch. Councilors have to split their time between two very different jobs and often lack the expertise necessary for running the bureaus the mayor has assigned them. Frequent shake-ups by the mayor and voters make long-term planning difficult. Voters have few ways to know whether incumbents are doing a good job running a bureau.
These and other issues make Portland’s government less responsive to residents’ concerns, and decrease trust in both the elected officials running the bureaus and the city staffers who do the bureaus’ work. And Portland is out of line with other major cities in the United States: the other 99 of the 100 largest American cities all leave the legislating to a city council and the actual running of the city to a mayor and/or city manager. Portland’s system just doesn’t square with its image as a progressive, example-setting urban center.
The Charter Commission plans to propose a system that would take the day-to-day running of government out of the City Council’s hands. What hasn’t been decided is what Portland’s executive branch could look like. There’s a range of possibilities that assign different powers to the City Council, a mayor elected citywide (or no mayor), and a city manager appointed by the City Council or the Mayor (or no city manager).
Tonight (Thursday, March 10) is one of the last opportunities for Portlanders to let the Charter Commission know how their proposed reforms should be changed, and what the answers to these essential questions should be. Portlanders can also submit written comment to the commission through March 28. By the end of the month, the commission plans to start the ballot measure drafting process through the City Attorney’s office. The commission will only consider small changes after that before deciding whether to include each measure on the ballot. In November, Portland voters will make the final call on whether to adopt these changes to city government and elections.
Clay Shentrup
The argument here for RCV over STAR voting is profoundly misguided and misleading. RCV fails the favorite betrayal criterion and independence of irrelevant alternatives itself. RCV is *more* vulnerable to tactical voting, as shown by both game theory analysis and computer simulation experiments.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/strategy-with-star-voting-and-irv-1ec22028399d
I have been involved in this field for over 15 years and would be more than happy to join Jay Lee in a moderated debate on the issue.
Clay Shentrup
> Voters can pick their true favorite first and fill out the rest of the ballot without worrying that they’ll hurt their first choice or that their vote will be “wasted” on a candidate that might not be a strong contender.
This is simply incorrect. See an explanation by Andy Jennings, who did his PhD thesis on voting methods and co-founded the Center for Election Science.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
Simple example:
35% Left Center
33% Right Center
32% Center
Center is eliminated first. If Left wins, then Right voters will wish they had strategically ranked Center in 1st place. If Right wins, then Left voters will wish they had strategically ranked Center in 1st place.
Terry Harris
Deploying multi-member districts when most jurisdictions are getting rid of them is such a bad idea. It’s frustrating to see Sightline wagging the voting methods dog such that it can’t see the governance problems.
For example, congrats to Green and Yellow voters in your multi-member graphic for electing their representative of choice. But after they’re elected, green and yellow are outvoted on every issue coming before the council anyway. Doesn’t this create political friction within the district? Since everyone runs against everyone else, there’s no political motive to cooperate except on issues of popular importance … which can be just as easily (and less expensively) handled by single members. And, by the way, Green and Yellow are now subject to an ugly recall in Portland by a simple majority anyway.
And what if one of the blue representatives turns out to be sleeping on the job? What is the multi-member district math to dislodge an incumbent with a bad record? When it’s easier to elect a representative it’s that much harder to get rid of one. Protected in multi-member districts, incumbents can (and do) camp out forever.
And how is gerrymandering a problem for single-member districts but not multi-member districts? In larger multi-member districts the big white affluent neighborhoods will absolutely dominate whatever district gets drawn around them. But smaller district maps can easily isolate their influence.
It’s just so unfortunate and disappointing to see yet other in SIghtline’s motivated reasoning series on the Portland Charter.
Sara Wolk
Hi Jay,
This is Sara Wolk, Executive Director from the Equal Vote Coalition. I’m glad to see that you’ve updated your article and removed the link originally cited to say that voters bullet vote in STAR Voting, as the link cited had nothing to do with STAR and was published before STAR was invented. Thank you for that. I appreciate your willingness to have honest and open discussions. To that end, I’d like to hopefully convince you that the point itself needs reevaluation. We respect Sightline and hold it to a high bar, expecting it to publish reports with good data behind its assertions. Equal Vote would like to officially request that your article be taken down, and that you publish a retraction for the misinformation included. See below for details.
On STAR Voting and vetting:
You write-
“STAR is an untested system with a much lower potential to meaningfully address the flaws in Portland’s elections.”
While STAR Voting is still relatively new, having been invented in 2014, it is no longer untested. In 2020 STAR Voting was used for the Independent Party of Oregon’s primary election, and it was also used by the Democratic Party of Oregon for the election of Oregon’s presidential delegates to the National Democratic Convention. At the local level STAR has been successfully used for all internal elections of the Multnomah County Democratic Party, endorsement elections for Deschutes County Democratic Party, and for internal elections and votes by many other political parties and organizations. STAR Voting’s also been extensively vetted by the electoral science community and by the use of statistical analysis, and the findings have been consistently best in class.
Additionally, like RCV, there is a proportional version of STAR voting, which works much like STV and boasts the same benefits and then some. Like STV, Proportional STAR Voting passes quota rules and ensures fully proportional descriptive representation, but it does so without requiring centralized tabulation and auditing.
On STAR and Voter Behavior:
The claim above is largely based on the false assertion that STAR Voting is vulnerable to bullet voting. The fact is that STAR Voting strongly incentivises voters to be expressive, just like in RCV, but STAR also strongly incentivises voters to honestly support their favorite, whereas doing so in RCV can (and does) backfire. (Look up IRV non-monotonicity.) Numerous studies on this have corroborated the finding that strategic voting is less incentivized in STAR than in RCV. For this reason, unless you have evidence with a statistically relevant sample size to the contrary, this point deserves a retraction.
Internal data from orgs which have used STAR in real world elections has not demonstrated problematic or inexpressive behaviors and voters generally are expressive and do not bullet vote. We can provide election data to support this if needed. What we did find was bullet voting rates much lower than FairVote’s findings of a 32% bullet voting rate in RCV elections, though the trends of who does it were similar for both methods. Voters in polarized factions with only one candidate they like are the more likely to bullet vote regardless of the method. Voters with more options they like are more likely to be expressive. Voters whose favorite is sure to win are less likely to support others.
The FairVote report on bullet voting in RCV also highlights another key point that should serve as a word of caution to pundits like yourself. Voters who are told they should bullet vote are much more likely to do so than those who are not, even though that advice is demonstrably terrible. This means that when you publish papers telling people they should bullet vote in STAR – falsely – you could be to blame if they do so and it hurts them. This talking point is not only false; it’s dangerous.
On districting:
The argument you make against at-large elections and how they are essentially winner-take-all and create barriers to representation is solid, and we agree 100%, but I think it’s important to not conflate all non-proportional elections as being winner-take-all.
I also want to affirm the many potential benefits that you outlined of proportional representation. What I’m about to say is not an anti-PR argument, but it is a plea to accurately and fairly represent and compare the other election models that we may find ourselves adopting in Portland if PR doesn’t go through, or if we take a staged approach to switching to it. Non-PR methods are not all created equally.
So, on that note, I’m concerned about a point in your article which is presented in a way that’s misleading. Your article states:
“The commission is also considering single-member districts. But that’s simply another flavor of winner-take-all that would lead to the same outcomes we have now.1”
Single-member districts are not winner-take-all. Each winner wins one of the many district seats, and those winners will each represent the will of the people in that district. For example, the Oregon legislature is elected in districts, and despite the fact that Oregon is a blue state, we do have Republicans who win, because voters in Eastern Oregon are ideologically different from those in PDX. Similarly, Portland voters in North Portland are not the same as those in the West Hills.
You state:
“Unlike single-member districts, it’s extremely hard to gerrymander a multi-member district,”
This is true, but as stated it implies that gerrymandering single-winner districts in Portland would be possible and that we need to take measures to protect against it, but then later you say that the dispersion of people of color in PDX means that a racial or political gerrymander would be impossible anyways. These two points together mean that using fear of a racial gerrymander in Portland is unfounded, not to mention that appropriating this angle to further a political agenda is beyond problematic.
You say,
“Because communities of color, renters, and other non-majority groups are spread across the city, single-member districts would continue to prevent them from electing candidates of their choice.”
This is false. The fact that districting would be unable to guarantee a minority faction a seat is not the same as districting preventing them from winning a seat. For people of color in particular, as well as non-polarizing minority groups of all types they absolutely could win representation and get to 50% +1 by way earning support from other like minded voters. The point above is the central argument widely being used to argue that single-winner districts are bad for people of color, a point which is not supported by historical data, either locally or nationally. This is very important because there is actually a strong case to be made illustrating the opposite – that switching to single-winner districts and local representation helps people of color and women win elections. (Reasons include the fact that smaller districts decrease the number of doors to knock for a campaign and decrease the average cost to run a successful campaign, while increasing the impact that being a known and respected member of your district can have on a successful campaign.)
Single-winner districts in the Portland area have been proven to work to elect women and people of color as we saw firsthand in 2016 when Multnomah County, (which uses single-winner districts) elected a majority minority commission. Note that this happened before the city of Portland (with at-large elections) had ever elected a single woman of color. While this is a single data point, it fits with the national trends.
I understand that Sightline is building a case for Proportional Representation in Portland, which could lead to more equitable representation in multi-member districts, and I understand that this is the reason you are pulling for multi-member districts, but in the event that PR doesn’t go through, muddying these waters and advocating for larger districts across the board has the potential to backfire and hurt Portland’s people of color and already marginalized voters, depending on the implementation.
While it’s true that single-winner districts would not be able to guarantee representation for people of color, it’s worth noting that Portland’s Latinx (8%), Asian (7%), Black (5%), and other PoC communities aren’t large enough for proportional representation to guarantee them representation either, even if they did vote as a block. Republicans (at 18%), on the other hand, would be sure to benefit.
If there were six multi-member districts in Portland, (the minimum to ensure local representation for N, NE, SE, E, Downtown, and W PDX) council would have to be increased to a gigantic 20 winners per district and 120 city councilors citywide to create a win threshold of 5%* and guarantee representation for Black voters if they vote as a block for Black candidates. If we instead try to set a threshold that would ensure a PoC winner (regardless of race,) we would need a threshold of over 25%. This would require increasing the council to 24 members up from the current 5, or else denying outer E PDX their own district. Both options are unlikely to happen. (*Exact threshold would depend on the quota chosen, but the point holds regardless.)
Here’s the takeaway. The selling points, pros and cons, and considerations for multi-member districts with PR are dramatically different and sometimes opposite of the considerations for multi-member districts without PR. These points need to be detangled from each other and presented separately if there is a chance they will be implemented separately. It’s also relevant to know if you are advocating for a Portland with 4 multi-member districts, or if you are arguing for 6, or 10, or 20. Many of the claims being made about benefits for PR in Portland are over generalized, and while they may be true for a country with very, very low PR thresholds, they wouldn’t hold up as it’s likely to be implemented in Portland. Please don’t make claims about multi-member that won’t hold up if PR doesn’t pass, and please don’t make claims for PR that won’t hold true as it would be implemented here in Portland.
This is especially relevant because recent information leads us to believe that Proportional Ranked Choice is not legally or logistically viable in Portland specifically. Our local election laws are clear that ballots need to be tabulated and audited at the county level, but RCV systems including RCV and STV require centralized tabulation. Portland is a tri-county city and these three counties use two different election vendors. Even if the state law was changed to give Portland an exception, the cost would be extremely high. Knowing all of this, we see it as likely that Portland may well not be able to move forward with STV or RCV. If that does happen it’s important that people understand the pros and cons for the other options and their possible implementations.
I hope you will take this feedback open mindedly. I also would like to invite you to meet over zoom to discuss the points covered above, share data, and to hopefully get on the same page about voter education and advocacy for more equitable Portland elections.
In good faith,
Sara Wolk
Executive Director | Equal Vote Coalition
sara@equal.vote