The real problem

They released some new numbers in the Portland City Council elections yesterday. Nothing really changed. Eric Zimmerman is still winning the third and final seat from District 4, and Jamie Dunphy is still winning the third and final seat from District 1.

I suspect there will be some more ballots counted in the next week, as signature challenges are resolved, but I'd be shocked if they changed anything. Yesterday's results are the same as they were in the first tally on Election Night.

And it remains true that except for Zimmerman, all of the ultimate winners in the council races came in in the top three in first-choice balloting. Zimmerman was in fourth place, 112 votes out of third place, in the first-choice round of the latest tally. The later rankings by voters who preferred Lisa Freeman, Sarah Silkie, and Chad Lykins moved Zimmerman ahead of third-place first-choice candidate Eli Arnold.

Ugh, "rank choice." Let's use that race as an example of how undemocratic the whole process is. While voters whose first choice was a fringe candidate like Christopher Regis got their choices counted up to six times, as full votes, those whose first pick was Zimmerman or Arnold did not have their second or later rankings considered at all. And the later-choice votes of those who most favored winner Olivia Clark counted as only 3/18918 of a vote, or 0.00016 of a vote; the later-choice votes of those who most favored winner Mitch Green counted as only 898/19813 of a vote, or 0.04532 of a vote.

That is ridiculous, and there ought to be a law against it.

But when you step back and look at the disastrous results of this first election under the new city charter, it's not the ranking business that stands out as the biggest stinker. As I say, in 11 out of 12 cases, the results would have been the same even if it was an unranked, top-three election.

The real problem is that there are three seats in each district but only one race for all of them. If you isolated each of the three seats and made the candidates pick which one they're running for, you would likely get different results than the far-left book club we wound up with. In District 4, for example, you could have seats 4A, 4B, and 4C, and a candidate can run for only one of them. 

You could even play the "rank choice" game for each of them. But I'll bet you wouldn't get three literal socialists, a Hardesty 2.0, a Rubio 2.0, three hacks, and four flacks.

What Portland really needed was seven districts, and one representative from each. But instead we got the poor judgment and blatant self-interest of the charter commission. It can still be fixed. But the voters are probably going to have to go over the heads of the City Council socialistas to clean it up.