City Elections Officials Explain Ranked-Choice Voting

In November, Portlanders will cast their votes for local government using ranked-choice voting. As the city amps up voter education efforts, city and county elections officials have been making the rounds to answer questions about voting ranked-choice and how they’re educating voters in the lead-up to November.

Multnomah County Elections Director Tim ScottVoters opted for the new system when they approved sweeping changes to the city charter in 2022. Ranked-choice voting heads off the possibility of run-off races by giving voters the opportunity to indicate not only their first choice in candidate, but also to present a list of their backup choices in order of preference. That means that if their top-choice candidate underperforms and is eliminated during the tabulation process, a percentage of that vote is applied to their second-choice candidates (more on that below), and so on.

What won’t change is how ballots are received and processed, Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott explained.

“The Multnomah County Elections Division is going to be mailing you your ballot in the mail, you’ll have up to 20 days to vote that ballot and return it to us, and when it comes back it’s going to come back to the Multnomah County Elections office, where we will count it and where we will release results,” he said during a presentation hosted by the City Club of Portland earlier this month.

Nor should election night press coverage change very much, Scott added.

“We are going to process ballots as we get them in. We’ve been doing that for decades. As vote-by-mail ballots come back, we can open them and scan them into the tally system so that at 8 o’clock on election night we’re ready to release the first results report of the election,” he said.

Scott confirmed Multnomah County would adopt ranked-choice voting for its 2026 county commission races.

Learning From Other Cities, States

Proponents for ranked-choice voting argue it is an antidote to voter fears that supporting a less popular candidate is the same as throwing away a vote. This mentality is often at work in presidential elections when voters who support a third-party candidate instead cast their vote for the Republican or Democrat candidate they view more likely to win.

Ranked-choice voting is currently used in a number of states and cities, and has already arrived in Oregon: Benton County first used ranked-choice in the 2020 county commissioner races, and the city of Corvallis adopted it in 2022 to elect its mayor and council members.

The city-commissioned explainer comic, written by Beka Feathers and illustrated by Aki Ruiz.
Ranked choice in multi-winner races has been used in Cambridge, Mass. since 1941, and in Minneapolis since 2009.

“We’re not making all of this up,” Leah Benson, ranked choice voting project manager for Multnomah County Elections, said. “We’re not the first jurisdiction to use ranked-choice voting…Our strategy is rooted in best practices we’ve learned from all of those other jurisdictions from around the country that have already implemented ranked-choice voting. We’ve been collaborating with (other districts) intentionally, to learn from them how they implemented their program.”

In terms of voter education, that has meant timing informational efforts to start after May’s general election, which did not use ranked-choice, to avoid confusion.

“(We learned) it should be targeted,” Benson said. “First, by demographics, with a focus on populations who have traditionally been underrepresented in voter turnout, including communities of color, low-income and houseless communities, people whose first language is not English, as our main population. And voter education is ballot-focused.

"Voters’ primary concern is understanding how to express their choice on the ballot.”

In June the city allocated $210,000 in for its Portland Votes 2024 Grants Program, to support local community organizations in their voter education efforts. Recipients include the Urban League of Portland, APANO, Native American Youth and Family Center, East County Rising Community Projects/Ebony Collective CDC, Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization and the BIPOC youth-focused Next Up.

Single Winner Vs. Multi-Winner

There are two forms of ranked-choice voting at play in November: single-winner, to elect the mayor and city auditor, and multi-winner, to elect city district representatives (formerly known as city commissioners). That’s because Portland has adopted a map that breaks the city into four distinct geographic districts, with three representatives elected to each.

The city of Portland's sample ranked-choice ballot for a multi-winner race.With single-winner ranked-choice voting, a candidate meets the threshold of winning by securing 50% of the vote, plus one vote. With multi-winner ranked-choice voting, the ballot will look the same, but because three winners will be selected, each must meet a threshold of 25% of the votes plus one to secure a victory.

And then vote transfers come into play. In a single-winner race, voters who selected the least popular candidate as their first choice will have a percentage of their vote redistributed to their second choice. This is true in multi-winner races as well, where additional redistribution comes from “surplus votes.”

“Surplus votes come when a candidate reaches a threshold for election and has more votes than needed to win,” Benson said. “Then, a fraction of every vote that candidate receives is shifted to that voter’s next-highest choice.”

Here’s an example: Candidate A is running in a race that will ultimately yield three winners. The threshold to win one of those three spots is 9,000 votes. Candidate A gets 10,000 votes, which means there are 1,000 surplus votes.

That doesn’t mean 1,000 votes go to other candidates – only a fraction of them will. That fraction is calculated by dividing 1,000 by the total number of votes Candidate A received (10,000), which comes to 0.1. The 10,000 voters who ranked Candidate A as their first choice then have 10% of their vote transferred to their second-choice candidate.

“The reason that we do this is that we’re making sure that everyone’s full vote is counted,” Benson said. 

The votes will be tabulated using Clear Ballot ClearCount technology.

Scott pointed out that Portland extends slightly into both Clackamas and Washington counties, which have not adopted ranked-choice. Scott said the three counties developed an intergovernmental agreement to coordinate Portland city election ballots. Clackamas and Washington counties currently lack the software to process ranked-choice votes, so Portland voters outside of Multnomah County will still have their ballots processed in their respective county elections offices, then securely transferred to Multnomah County’s election division to be counted.

Portland voters can still cast votes for write-in candidates and specify how they want that candidate to be ranked in order of preference. 

Confused? Here Are Some Resources

The city has prepared public education materials to appeal to a variety of learning styles, and has made many of those materials available in other languages:

A video explainer:

A practice ranked-choice online ballot for favorite ice cream flavors that quickly tabulates user input and then gives a visual demonstration of how all votes would be counted and redistributed in a multi-winner contest: http://www.bit.ly/rcv-icecream.

A comic by two local artists that answers frequently asked questions about ranked-choice voting: portland.gov/vote/documents/guide-portlands-government-transition/download

For additional info, visit https://www.portland.gov/vote.

The Skanner previously interviewed ranked-choice voting expert Grace Ramsey.