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Portland enters ‘uncharted territory’ with first-in-nation City Council election system
(www.oregonlive.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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This title is click bait, and wrong. Ranked Choice Voting is used, and has been in use, across the country for years - including in city councils.
In particular, city councils in St Paul and Minneapolis used Ranked Choice for elections in 2023.
Are the reporters just bad at their jobs, or is it just click bait hinging on the specifics of the "version" of Ranked Choice Voting? What's so different about their "version" of RCV that makes it so deserving of the alarmist title?
The article is paywalled.
It looks like the difference between the RCV elections you linked and the Portland one is that the Portland election has 3 seats available per district race instead of 1. There are at least 3 ways that could be managed:
Do a standard RCV elimination, but stop once you have 3 candidates left.
Do a standard RCV elimination until you have a majority candidate. That candidate gets one of the seats. Then remove that candidate, reassign their votes, and continue elimination until you have a new majority candidate. Repeat.
Do a standard RCV elimination until you have a majority candidate. That candidate gets one of the seats. Then restart the RCV count for the second seat with voters’ 1st choices, but the first seat winner removed from the running. Repeat for the third seat.
Edit: It’s none of the above! 😂 It’s a combination of 2 & 3 known as Single Transferrable Vote. The article (archived) doesn’t at all explain how counting works, but this video does.
Ah. STV isn't particularly complex to understand, either at voting or calculation time. It's a decent choice for multi-winner elections, which it sounds like the Portland election is.
Sorry about that, I promise it wasn't paywalled when I linked it. :( Looks like archive.org got 2 copies of it and both of them are the paywall version.
Here's what separates out what Portland is doing:
Previously you had 5 city council people and each one had certain city bureaus they were in charge of, with the Mayor having the police department.
They were each elected "at large", so while they had bureau responsibilities, nobody was accountable for any one particular district of the city.
Now what's going to happen is the city is split into 4 districts, each district gets 3 city council members. All the city bureaus are being moved to a new City Manager position.
The 12 council members will vote on city policy in a style similar to the Senate, with the Mayor holding the tie breaking vote.
The election itself, seems like it could be pretty chaotic. Each district will have an entire slate of candidates to fill the three positions, and it's "vote for three" with ranked choice balloting.
So, in my district, district 1, there are 17 candidates:
https://www.portlandmercury.com/city-council-race-2024/2023/11/21/46766358/meet-the-portland-city-council-candidates-district-1
That, alone, would be a hell of a choice in any election, but there are THREE OTHER DISTRICTS.
Sorry for the lag.
So, this is good information; fixing FPTP is great; proportional representation is even better. It does sound like a potential minefield for spoiled ballots; hopefully the folks setting up the voting figure out a clear and concise way to present options.
In MN, we're still using paper ballots. In PA, years ago, there were digital voting booths. I think the latter is the best way to guide voters through the process; the PA machines were used for the selections; you still got a printed ballot with you choices that you could verify, and submitted that. As voting gets more complex, having a guided process becomes really helpful.
Anyway, it's good to see change, even if there's initial turbulence.
OR is 100% vote by mail, so all paper ballots. It's going to be a wild ride this first time through!
That's really interesting! In an election judge this year, and before we opened for the primaries there was a vigorous debate about remote voting. MN's check-in and on-site registration system is entirely digital; the judges just press the buttons for the voters. We will use paper ballots, but we can use the same iPads we use for check-in for voting as well - for accessibility. People can drive up, call in and day they want to vote at their car, and a judge walks one of the iPads out to them. We have everything in place except in there booths, and we're not ready for online voting (is any state?).
Anyway, speculated out loud if we'd even have polling stations in another decade, and to my surprise, most of the other judges had strong opinions about the importance of voting in person; how it gave the process more gravitas.
It's interesting to learn that OR went completely mail-in. My only fundamental concern about remote voting is coercion; I don't know how you prevent, e.g., an abusive spouse (or brown shirts) from co-opting the mail in or digital voting system, and forcing someone to vote a particular way. Polling-place intimidation and accessability are very real concerns, but I think they're dwarfed by the abuse-ability of mail-in voting. Fully digital, however, has some great opportunities for addressing this, such as rescinding and re-voting.
Really interesting topic though. My final point is that most of the other judges were older than me, and I wonder how much that affected their opinions about the importance of polling stations.
Well, coercive voting is a crime, so there is that. But we've been doing vote by mail for 24 years and haven't really had a problem.
In the early days someone tried a "drop off your ballot here!" scam and tried to throw them away. They got caught.
A few years back (12! 12 years!), an election worker got caught filling in portions of ballots that had been left blank:
https://katu.com/archive/former-elections-worker-pleads-guilty-to-ballot-tampering-gets-90-days
So, first, to be clear: I'm in favor of vote-by-mail. I believe it's more of an enabler than a risk.
That said:
First, so is domestic violence. If a person is willing to break that law, why wouldn't they also be willing to break a law and force their spouse to fill in a ballot their way?
Second, how would we know that is not a problem? Do we have studies that have surveyed survivors of domestic violence to ask whether or not their spouse ever forced them to fill in a mail-in ballot a certain way, which found that it's rare?
Third, imagine a world of Project 2025, where Brown Shirts exist again. Or, just mafia-esque gangsters, if you will. Being illegal is not going to stop organized crime from forcing an entire apartment block from filling in a ballot in front of an enforcer. And I think it's naïve to think it couldn't happen today, anymore that we were naïve to believe defeating the Nazis in 1945 meant we wouldn't see the rise of his kind again being a threat 71 years later.
I do think there are solutions, in rescindable votes and re-voting; there are voting systems (software) designed with these sorts of features built in. With these systems, you can change your vote as many times as you like up until the polls close; this wouldn't prevent abusive-spouse scenarios, but would make mass coercion much harder. But I do think there's opportunity for abuse with mail-in ballots, much more so in a world of Project 2025, where the people braking the law against coercion are also pals with the ones charged with enforcing it.
It's less of a problem with spousal abuse and more of a problem with corporate abuse.
A spouse might impact one vote.
A company could go "Ok, everyone bring in your ballots and lets all fill them out together!"
But, again, that's illegal and hasn't really happened. From a corporate perspective, you'd only need one employee to rat you out and you're done. The risk/reward ratio just isn't there.
Because the reactionaries are nuts about Portland politics and the puppet masters gotta whip them into an angry mob.