Portland’s 1st ranked-choice election reshaped races — but vote reallocation made little difference

In the end, Portland's first ranked-choice election saw little impact from the much-discussed rounds of vote reallocation.

In the mayor's race, business owner Keith Wilson, who earned the most first-place votes, went on to easily win . In the City Council races , 11 of the 12 candidates who placed in the top three in their district in the first round won or are leading after the final round of vote transfers, near-final results show.

The full consequences of the city's new electoral system, including the switch to district-level contests with multiple winners, remain uncertain. Candidates and voters are likely to behave differently when the system moves past its debut and into subsequent use in 2026 and 2028. And a small fraction of ballots cast by Nov. 5 are still to be tallied.

But experts said the stability of Portland's results from round one to final outcome indicates that Oregon's largest city has fallen largely in line with similar ranked-choice systems.

"Usually, if you have a lot of first place support, that's enough to carry you through to the end," said Lee Drutman, who researches ranked-choice voting at liberal think tank New America.

Even some of those who opposed Portland's new election system acknowledged vote reallocation seems to have made limited difference. Sara Wolk, executive director of the Equal Vote Coalition, which opposed Portland's specific ranked-choice system, said she was glad that to see the winners were, in her view, largely noncontroversial.

"What we saw in Portland's recent elections, both for mayor and for City Council, is that any voting method likely would have elected the same set of people," Wolk said.

Jenny Lee, managing director of Building Power for Communities of Color, the Coalition of Communities of Color's political arm, disagreed. She said Portland's unique multi-winner system for choosing City Council members, with each of three winners required to accumulate just 25% of first-, second- or even fifth- and sixth-choice ranks in their district as lower-performing candidates are eliminated, is key. It allows a minority population spread throughout a district to have significant sway over at least one of their council members.

And indeed, the winners are diverse, with at least five people of color, three renters and politicians whose political leanings range from moderate to Democratic Socialist set to take office in January.

Portland voters approved the switch to a ranked-choice system in 2022 as part of a package of changes to the city's charter. Under the new rules, voters can rank up to six candidates each for mayor and for seats on an expanded City Council, with 12 members representing four districts. Mayoral candidates must surpass 50% of the vote after ranked-choice rounds to win.

Portland implemented its particular system, including its unique multi-winner approach for council, as ranked-choice voting faced setbacks across the country. A statewide measure to repeal ranked-choice voting in Alaska is on track to pass, according to the Associated Press.

And, while a measure to institute such a system passed in Washington, D.C., ranked choice measures failed in Oregon, Colorado, Idaho and Nevada. The Oregon vote wasn't close, with 58% rejecting it. An effort to block ranked-choice voting also succeeded in Missouri.

Champions of Portland's ranked-choice method for local elections touted the system's promise to boost civic engagement.

But voter confusion about the system remained relatively high, even soon before the election. Despite the city's extensive voter outreach program , voters indicated in an October poll commissioned by The Oregonian/OregonLive that a full third of them understood this new system "not too well" or "not at all well."

And ultimately, 20% of voters citywide who filled out ballots and returned them on time didn't rank a single candidate for City Council.

That was lower than in the two most recent fall City Council contests: Only 7% of people who voted did not cast a vote in the council contest in 2022 and 15% did not do so in 2020. The substantial share who left their vote for City Council blank this year appeared more on par with the higher rates of not bubbling in any candidate, known as under voting, in 2018 and 2016: 17% and 22% respectively.

"We still only saw the under vote climb by a pretty reasonably small amount when you look at the historical trends," said Damon Motz-Storey, the Oregon chapter director for Sierra Club and a former advocate for the changes to Portland's charter. "So I think that actually is very encouraging given the fact that the ballot looked really different this year."

With the city's first ranked-choice election done, Portland State University political science professor Melody Valdini said she hopes some voters' concerns will be allayed.

"There's no big shenanigan that happens where votes transfer in a shocking way," she said. "That's what we've seen in other places, in other countries that use this system too. It generally is just reflecting back voter preferences."

Impacts of an overhauled system

Many local political watchers and researchers said Portland's electoral reforms vastly reshaped the races, even though round one leaders largely went on to prevail.

Melanie Billings-Yun, who served as co-chair of the Portland Charter Commission that proposed the changes, said the system freed voters to select their top candidate even if they thought that person was unlikely to prevail.

The candidates' campaigns were also friendlier and less cutthroat than they have been in the past, said Motz-Storey.

And champions of the system said that it succeeded in one of its main goals: expanding the diversity of City Council.

The coming City Council will be relatively diverse in ways beyond race and socioeconomics. Its likely members represent age groups in every decade from their 20s to their 70s. Half are women, and three live east of Interstate 205.

Whether this is attributable to ranked-choice voting, however, is not clear.

The makeup of the current City Council, elected under the previous system, showed the city was already moving toward favoring racial diversity in its leaders, with two Latino commissioners and one Black commissioner on the five-member council.

Marina Kaminsky, research manager of North Star Civic Foundation, a nonprofit that tracks local election data, said election watchers should hesitate to attribute anything solely to the new system so soon.

"We have sample size one for all of the RCV races, so that's where I want to be really careful about assuming causality for any of the outcomes we're seeing," Kaminsky said. "Any claim that folks are trying to make that RCV caused x or y, it's just too early."

It's also uncertain to what extent voters of color engaged with the new system.

In District 1, which has the lowest median income and the highest proportion of people of color, only 40% or so of registered voters cast a vote for any City Council candidate.

North Star Civic estimated that between 51% and 57% of District 1 registered voters cast votes in the council races in 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020 — meaning this year saw a significant drop. (The numbers are close estimates, not exact matches, because the new district boundaries were not used in prior elections.)

By contrast, registered voters in Districts 2, 3 and 4 appear to have cast votes in their City Council races at rates roughly similar to those from 2008, 2012 and 2016, the North Star Civic data shows. Those districts' voters' rates of participation in council races dropped from 2020, when Portland voters showed anomalously high participation in local races, according to the estimates.

An analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive also showed a gaping difference between how many voters in District 1 who cast ballots this fall didn't rank a single candidate for Portland City Council — 29% — versus rates of about 18% in the whiter, wealthier districts.

Those findings align with research that showed white and affluent voters in Minneapolis, which has used ranked-choice voting since 2009, were more likely to fill out ranked-choice ballots correctly and to rank more candidates compared with people of color and lower-income voters.

"Historically marginalized communities are often the hardest hit by anything that makes the process more difficult," Wolk said.

Did voter participation improve?

Proponents of the new electoral system argue that it boosted voter engagement by eliminating the primary election, where a consistently small subset of voters turn out.

In Multnomah County, turnout in primary elections has generally been in the 30% to 40% range, while general election turnout normally tops 70%.

Valdini, the Portland State University professor, said that Portland's nonpartisan primaries have typically driven candidates closer to the middle. Eliminating the primary and letting everyone have their say in the general election leaves the field open to a wider range of perspectives, she said.

One risk that critics of ranked-choice voting often point to, however, is the phenomenon of "ballot exhaustion," meaning all the candidates a voter ranked get eliminated so that the voter has zero say on which of the final leaders prevail.

This also means candidates can sometimes be elected without reaching 50% or 25% of the total votes cast.

In the Portland mayor race, for instance, Wilson triumphed with 59% of the votes remaining in the final round. But he actually accrued just a hair under 50% of the total votes cast in the race, due to about 16% of ballots becoming exhausted.

Though it's difficult to compare Portland's unique ranked-choice system to other cities', Portland's exhausted ballot rates appear to be on par with elsewhere. New York saw 17% of ballots be exhausted in the 2021 Democratic primary for mayor, and San Francisco saw that rate hit 27% in its 2011 mayoral race.

The City Council rates are harder to assess because multi-winner systems are rare. In Portland, the exhaustion rates in each district ranged from 11% to 16% this year.

Jack Santucci, the author of the 2022 book "More Parties or No Parties: The Politics of Electoral Reform in America," said exhaustion rates in three U.S. cities that used a similar system in the mid-1900s ranged from 2% to 12% — lower than Portland's City Council races, but not astronomically so.

Nevertheless, Billings-Yun insisted, those exhausted ballots are still a form of meaningful participation — just as votes for the losing candidate still matter in a first-past-the-post system.

"I didn't vote for Trump. He won," she said. "And no one's happy when they don't win, but it does count."

Exhaustion rates also increase when more candidates run, Drutman and Santucci both said. They also said far more candidates tend to run in the first ranked-choice election than afterward, indicating that exhaustion rates in Portland are likely to shrink in future races.

Any conclusions about exactly how ranked-choice voting will play out in Portland should therefore wait, Motz-Storey said, as candidate pools shrink and voters become more familiar with the process.

"I think it's incumbent upon us to be patient and to look at the longer term trends and to allow this to really percolate in the community for a period of time," they said, "before making those kinds of judgments."