It's rank, all right
I've been trying to wrap my head around the daffy "rank choice" voting system that Portland's going to use in the upcoming city elections, and it's hard work trying to understand it.
There are two different levels of cray-cray here. I decided to start with the simpler one, the mayor's race, because there will only be one winner there. According to my friendly neighborhood association newspaper, here are the rules:
First of all, knowledgeable readers, do they have it right?
And if they do, does my hypthetical scenario, described below, illustrate it correctly?
Say there are six candidates for mayor, three mainstream and three wack jobs. I'll call them MS1, MS2, MS3, WJ4, WJ5, and WJ6. Let's assume that all the ballots that come in are properly marked, and no votes are invalid. Now assume that the voters' first choices are as follows:
Under the old system, MS1 and MS2 would move to a runoff. But those days are over, folks. We're rank and dank now.
Nobody's got more than 50% of the votes, and so it's on to Round 2. As I understand it, WJ6 is eliminated, and WJ6 fans (those who picked WJ6 as their first choice) now get their second choices counted. Assume that it just so happens that the WJ6 second choices are split evenly among the other five cadidates. That gets us to this:
Still no majority, and so it's on to Round 3. WJ5 now gets bounced, and WJ5's fans get their second choices counted. And as I understand it, the twenty WJ6 fans whose second choice was WJ5 now get their third choices counted.
But here's where I get a little stuck. What if a WJ5 fan listed WJ6 as her second choice? WJ6 was eliminated in an earlier round. Does that mean the WJ5 fan's vote doesn't count in this third round? Or do we go to the WJ5 fan's third choice, and count it in the third round? I would assume the latter, but there's no use getting any further in my scenario until we have that nailed down. Does any reader understand this well enough to answer the question?
And have I screwed this up already?
Sheesh, what a mess.
UPDATE, 3:45 p.m.: I've dug around some more and found some good answers in the revised city elections code, which is Chapter 2.08 of the City Code. I'll start all over with this exercise again soon, probably tonight.
UPDATE, Oct. 26: I posted more about this in several places, most notably here, here, and here.
The wonderful new charter says "the candidates having the fewest votes are successively eliminated in rounds and their votes are counted as votes for the candidates who are ranked next on the ballots that had been counted for the eliminated candidates." Doesn't answer my question, I don't think.
ReplyDeleteAnd remember, Portland extends into three counties, so for a couple of the districts and the mayor's race, you'll have to wait on the Washington and Clackamas county election offices before you can finish a round of voting,
DeleteIt could take forever.
Delete"It's GONNA take forever." Fixed it for ya!
DeleteNo one is even factoring in the time it takes to adjudicate all the we-wuz-robbed lawsuits...
You can bet that every civil litigator in Metro is studying the “reforms”…hanging on every word. It’s going to mean YEARS of full employment for them.
DeleteSo poorly thought out. A true mess
ReplyDeleteAlso, what happens if people voting for W1, 2, or 3 only ‘rank’ their first choice and call it good? It is mathematically possible for no candidate to make it to 50%.
ReplyDeleteThe 50% test is determined based on the percentage of votes in each round. If no one picked a second choice, the one with the most first choice votes (in this case, MS1) would be the winner.
DeleteIn that case, the ballot is exhausted. If half the voters tick only one box, the winner will win with way less than half the vote.
Delete"If your first choice candidate is eliminated, your vote is transferred to your second choice candidate. If your second choice candidate is eliminated, your vote is then transferred to your third choice candidate, and so on. This process continues until enough candidates have enough votes to win." - I read this as your vote keeps passing along to any candidate that isn't eliminated. Once you're out of wackjobs in any round, your vote is done.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like it’s from the council races, not the mayor and auditor.
ReplyDeleteI have read every single damn record of the charter commission's two years of so-called "deliberations," and watched the horror of their ZOOM meetings (remember: they did their work in the mist of Covid lockdowns, riots, and "reimagining" the police) and I have no idea how the stupid three-member districts were first floated--and who brought it, steaming on a plate, to the commission. The commission was run by Julia Meier, formerly head of the Coalition of Communities of Color, then the City Club, then a city employee--need I say more? Ms. Meier doesn't answer her email and her flack just keeps saying, "Read the records online," which is the typical way our overlords say, Screw off.
ReplyDeleteTheir fatal error (among many) was doing away with primaries--a way to kick out the chaff. How anyone can be expected to "rank" 30 people is a mystery--one that didn't occur to Ms. Avalos and her buddies. Nor did Portland media bother to cover those two years of wonderful thinking...and now we have the grotesque example of the Oregonian trying to explain this with donuts.
God help us.
Do you think these are all Kamala voters and that itself presents a problem? Die by the dei horde....
DeleteWait till the computer gets confused and they attempt a hand count. Speaking of which, what happens if a race is within automatic recount margins?
ReplyDeleteAnd it all started when the reform commission was selected from a pool of progressive, liberal, young, inexperienced, naive activist whack jobs with pie in the sky aspirations. A fatal mistake from the get-go that will render Portland government even more dysfunctional until somehow sanity may eventually clean up this mess. Gawd help us!
ReplyDeleteThe “goal” of the so-called Charter Commission was not to make municipal government more efficient or not responsive. The “goal” was to make municipal government more “equitable” & “inclusive.”
DeleteI would posit that the RCV scheme & 3-rep districts will be gone before the next decade rolls around. The City can convene a Charter Comission as often as they want. The rules say “at least” every decade.
When the City grinds to a dead stop because of all this, the citizens can take te reins & do it by initiative if the City won’t.