Portland enters ‘uncharted territory’ with first-in-nation City Council election system
Portland enters ‘uncharted territory’ with first-in-nation City Council election system
“Portland is leading the way and should be proud of this fact.”
"In November, when voters elect three City Council members from each of four large districts, they will do so with a version of ranked-choice voting not used in any other U.S. city.
Voters will be allowed to choose up to six council candidates in order of preference, and candidates will only need 25% of first-, second- and potentially even third- and fourth-choice votes to win."
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:
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Do a standard RCV elimination, but stop once you have 3 candidates left.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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.
Because the reactionaries are nuts about Portland politics and the puppet masters gotta whip them into an angry mob.
This is the way.
Looks to me that a mod could easily make up an excuse to delete this,
Considering a mod posted it, nothing needs to be "made up". ;)
Exactly. The club abides.
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