Routh's second-choice votes defeat Ernst

Multnomah County just posted another set of election results in the Portland City Council races. We'll be studying them for a while, I suppose, and they're still preliminary. But the latest version of the District 1 tallies shows what can happen with "rank choice" voting.

When they got down to five remaining candidates, Noah Ernst was in third place, and Jamie Dunphy was in fourth.

Steph Routh, in fifth place, was eliminated at that point. And when Routh's second- and later-choice votes were doled out to the four survivors, a lot more of them went to Dunphy than to Ernst. And so Dunphy snagged the third and final seat; Ernst lost.

Again, these are not the final results. They'll do the whole song and dance over and over again as late-arriving ballots are counted. But "rank choice" is working its strange magic, that's for sure.

Note that as to those voters whose first choice was Ernst, Smith, or Dunphy, none of their second or later choices counted for anything. They were not even looked at by the computer. Only the other 12 losing candidates' first-choice voters, and Avalos's first-choice voters, got additional votes in the process beyond their first pick. (Avalos's "surplus" votes were counted at a small fraction of a vote.)

But Queen Candy of the Charter Revision Commission got her City Council paycheck. Mission accomplished.

UPDATE, Thursday morning: And by the way, the Ernst fans, Dunphy fans, and Smith fans, all of whose second and later choices were ignored, amounted to more than 35 percent of all those who voted.