PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Portland City Council members expressed serious concerns with the city’s rough draft for its ranked-choice voting system, one of the three major changes Portland voters approved to the city’s charter in November 2022.
The concerns, which were discussed during the first scheduled read-through for implementing ranked-choice voting, included a proposed limit on the number of candidates voters can rank for each race and the need for voter education for the methods and calculations behind the voting system.
Commissioner Mingus Mapps, who was a vocal opponent of Portland’s agreed-upon version of charter reform in November, scolded employees with the city and county’s election offices during a series of questions regarding the ranked-choice system’s methodology.
“I’ll confess guys, I’m a little bit confused in terms of how all this works,” Mapps said; video of the city council meeting caught him raising his voice to the point of repeatedly overmodulating his microphone.
Mapps raised questions about tabulation methods used in the ordinance like: “election threshold,” “transfer values” and “surplus fractions.”
“Being real,” Mapps said. “Do we have anyone on staff at the city who actually understands the math of what’s happening with election thresholds, surplus fractions, transfer values, and how to translate that into what I think of as a spreadsheet that can capture the various rounds of what we’re trying to do here?”
Responding to Mapps, Charter Implementation Transition Manager Shoshanah Oppenheim said that city employees relied on the approved charter language and the opinions of ranked-choice voting experts to draft the ranked-choice-voting ordinance. As a result, city employees drafting the change to the city’s election code decided that limiting voters to ranking a maximum of six candidates per race was the best option, even if the number of candidates is greater than six.
“The charter commissioners made a very deliberate choice not to include any number of rankings in their recommendations because they knew that they were not the experts on ranked-choice voting,” Oppenheim said. “So, when the city pulled together our work group to examine this question, we pulled in experts who have implemented ranked-choice voting across the country so that we could understand what’s best for our community.”
The wording of the ordinance also raised questions about caveats related to voting equipment issues in neighboring counties, as the City of Portland exists within Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties. Meanwhile, Multnomah County is still working with a contracted company to design software that can accommodate the city’s new voting system before it must go into effect for the Nov. 2024 general election.
“If a city candidate election is administered by county elections officers in more than one county, and one or more officers determines the voting equipment cannot accommodate six rankings on the ballot, the number of candidates a voter may rank for that election will be the maximum number that can be accommodated by the voting equipment that can accommodate the lowest maximum number of rankings, except that if the maximum number is greater than the total number of filed candidates and write-in lines for a contest, the number of available rankings in that contest will equal that total,” the ordinance reads.
Although supportive, commissioners Rene Gonzalez and Dan Ryan also expressed concerns about the complexity of the ordinance.
“When you have a complex formula — I’ve had to implement them and interpret them for 20 plus years in my professional life, and they have a place — but when you’re talking about elections, I have some level of concern about voter confidence,” Gonzalez said.
Commissioners will have more opportunities to address their concerns through the ordinance approval process or through the use of future ordinances. The city plans to provide the public with educational information about the city’s new voting process before the 2024 election. But for now, the city will work on educating itself.
“This council is going to vote on this and probably we’re all going to vote yes,” Mapps said. “But I do think at some point … it’s important that we all actually understand what the heck we’re doing here.”