Ranked Choice Voting

We’ll be voting on it in Portland in November… better understand it now.

Portland voters face some big decisions come November. Our whole City government system is up for change this year in one big package. If it passes, new district reps will be elected (with residency requirements) from geographic districts, they’ll have simpler jobs, and we’ll be getting a City manager. But the biggest change may be to the most fundamental part of democracy… the vote. Ranked Choice voting would replace the First-past-the-post system we have now. It seems to be a complex and new system, but it has a 100-year history in the US and it’s spreading like wildfire worldwide. Is Ranked Choice Voting the future of Portland, or even beyond? This explainer from the Washington Post might help you decide…

How ranked-choice voting could change the way democracy works

Harry Stevens in Washington Post, Updated Aug 2022

“In more and more elections across the country, voters have the option of ranking multiple candidates instead of choosing just one. It’s called ranked-choice voting, and its advocates say it promises to improve democracy as we know it. In a traditional voting system, voters select just one candidate. With ranked-choice voting, they rank candidates in order of preference.

With a traditional ballot, all the votes are added up, and the candidate with the most votes wins, even if that candidate did not win a majority of votes. (This system is sometimes called “plurality voting.”) With the ranked-choice ballot, if none of the candidates receives a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated, and her votes are distributed to her voters’ second-choice candidates. The process repeats until one of the candidates collects more than half the votes.

Ranked-choice voting is more complicated — and possibly more confusing — than plurality voting, so why bother? To see what the fuss is about, we can start by imagining an electorate made up of 200 voters…”

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