Let's Play the Ranked Choice Voting Game

Guess who will ultimately lose.

Jul 07, 2023

So—no big surprise—Mingus Mapps is running for the job we have previously described in this space as the “capon-mayor.” He is doing so under a new city charter that he opposed, saying…

I would be shocked if we pass this and then don't find ourselves revisiting that decision at some future date.

…and…

If you look at a reform and you can't really tell what benefits it's going to bring, or how it's going to change your politics, then why are you doing it?

…but then consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds1, or so they say.

Mapps—other than opposing the charter, then fading into the woodwork—doesn’t have much of a record to run on, but then the job he seeks has no real power. The city will be “run” by a “professional” (whatever that means) city manager.

Just what Portland needs: yet another unelected bureaucrat! Who will be approved (how? don’t ask) by a fractious city council and removed (why? another mystery) by a super-majority. The mayor, poor fellow, will be a spectator, at best, and if he and the “professional” get crosswise, no one knows how that will resolve. Meanwhile, the 12 “twenty-five percenters2” on the council will dispose of anything the mayor proposes and do as they damn well please, since the mayor won’t have a veto.

Paralysis with a tincture of craziness, anyone?

It’s beyond probable that there will be other entrants in the mayoral race; but no matter who runs, the problem will be getting actually elected. Which brings us face-to-face with the cornerstone of the new charter: ranked choice voting.

We first wrote about this way back in March 2022 (when this ‘stack had 150 subscribers), long before local media bothered to cover the charter commission’s deliberations. (Which turned out to be what would you would expect from people selected for political correctness, race, and “identity.”)

It is a good guess that very few of the 57-percent of Portlander voters who approved the new charter really understood how RCV works. (For a quick lesson in the mechanics, refer to our post here.) Or that RCV has serious mathematical issues in the way that votes are sliced ‘n’ diced—all within deeply obscure computer algorithms that are not yet fully written or tested.

Short version: it’s the usual gap between progressive wishes and results.

One of the latest big tests of RCV was up in Alaska in the 2022 election for the state’s one and only US Representative. (We wrote about it not long after—check this out for a dive into the deep weeds.) The contest was between only four candidates: one was an obvious nobody; one was a Democrat running in a state that had gone for President Trump by ten points and had never elected a Republican to high office; two Republicans were running neck-and-neck.

The GOP was in civil war mode, with former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin versus moderate Nick Begich. The two candidates got a total of 130,835 votes in the first round, with Palin at 68,330 votes.

The Democrat? Mary Peltola got 128,755 votes. Then the computers went to work; the vote-shifting took weeks.

And when the counting was done, Peltola went to Washington. Some slice ‘n’ dice!

What put her over the top, with a final vote total of 137,263 votes?

Obviously: the GOP was at war with itself, and enough Begich voters hated Palin enough (and vice-versa) to shuffle the winning margin of votes to Peltola’s side of the ledger. Short version: second-best won.

There was something else that most commenters missed: there were 14,796 “exhausted” votes—which Daniel DiSalvo explained in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal article in the aftermath…

RCV invites the problem of “ballot exhaustion,” which occurs when too many voters rank too few candidates such that their vote is not counted in the final runoff. Consider an election where five candidates are running but a voter ranks only three, all of whom get eliminated before the final tally. Since none of his votes will have gone to either the winner or the runner-up, his ballot is effectively discarded.

So, effectively, some get to vote two, three times—some didn’t, a clear invitation to a 14th amendment lawsuit. Portland complicates matters even further by cramming a primary round of voting (and, recall, this was one of progressives’ biggest reforms) into one big fat runoff.

Primaries are useful for winnowing out the weirdos and habitual-runners and downright crazies—but they’ll be cluttering up the November election—and the endless pages of the seldom-read Voters’ Pamphlets. It’s worth noting that the 2022 mayoral primary had 19 candidates and that unknowns such as Ozzie Gonzalez got 12,928 votes. Those votes will be shuffled upward as the Ozzies on the ballot get kicked out. Who will get them? Don’t ask. And hope the computer algorithm works correctly…or at all.

As we noted above, Mingus Mapps will probably have a lot of company on the ballot. If the guy who nailed the charter’s deficiencies decided to run despite them, expect a stampede to follow.

So, let’s play a game, with an eye toward the flaws that surfaced in the weird Alaska vote.

Let’s—just for fun—put together a hypothetical, but not improbable, ballot. Then rank-order your picks.

Game on!

Start with…

Ted Wheeler. A slam-dunk certainty, although there are credible observers who swear he won’t run—but, really—he’s making vigorous triangulation moves: a kamikaze attack one day, a tactical retreat another. Remember: he got elected the last time with 46-percent of the vote against a goofy opponent wearing Marxist martyr skirts, one…
Sarah Iannaroni, now head of an “everyone should ride bikes” non-profit ; she’ll draw votes from the neo-Marxist crazies fringe, while…
Sam Adams will try to disprove the adage that there are no second acts in political life (and he’ll have the pleasure of confounding the mayor who made a big public fuss about firing him), joined by other walk-on-the-wild-siders…
Dan Ryan will score double-points (AIDS, homeless deceased brother) if voters forget about his frustrating forays into the swamp of “Safe Rest” bum-dumps, while…
Julia Brim-Edwards, newly-elected county commissioner, will peel off the Very Serious Women (subset: lesbian) vote as she realizes being on the county board when you’re not chairperson is no fun and, besides the mayor’s pay is better…

…whereupon we move to the really serious stuff—race and ethnicity, starting with the up-and-comers…

…Vadim Mozyrsky, who bailed out of the charter commission, ran against fearsome black warrior Jo Ann Hardesty (and lost); who’s mulled running for just about any available office in town (was quoted saying he wouldn’t run for mayor, which means he will) and was lauded by WillyWeek for being “regularly seen at political events in a fresh-pressed suit;” and who might carry some Ukrainian hopes for bigger slices of the political-pie, versus…
…Rene Gonzalez, who unseated Hardesty, becoming one of two Hispanics on city council, which means that he and…
Councilperson Carmen Rubio will have to figure out how to avoid splitting the growing Hispanic minority’s votes, even though Gonzalez has gotten more ink and seems willing to pick tougher fights. She and Rene will also have to deal with rival ethnics, such as…
Rep. Khanh Pham, who represents East Portland’s felony flats and hails from the growing Vietnamese-American mini-machine. Her embarrassing “right to sleep” homeless legislation landed with a dull thud, thus feeding rumors that fellow Vietnamese are falling out of love with her—having fled Communism why elect a far-lefty here? But remember: there’s a big difference between the legislature’s $33K pay and the mayor’s $175K…
Meanwhile the non-profits, fat with city contracts, might drop one of their own into the mix. Let’s toss in a stellar non-profiteer: Peter Platt, Peruvian immigrant, big-time success story, owner of chi-chi Andina restaurant, on the board at the powerhouse Hacienda mega-non-profit. A Peruvian-American mayor…kicky!

The biggest traffic jam will be among black pols—members of the over-represented but statistically tiny “community,” surfing the cresting wave of white guilt. Start with the obvious candidacy of ever-eager…

Candace Avalos, a self-styled “blacktina,” (thus pushing two ethnic/racial buttons), executive director of the Verde racial-preferences non-profit, with a mouthpiece as a paid Oregonian columnist, and—just coincidentally—a member of the charter commission. She gets the award as Miss Naked Ambition—but may have to face vote-splitting with both Mapps and others, such as…
Jo Ann Hardesty, who will seek revenge, and a job that will pay a hefty $142,000 a year (and perhaps pay her credit card bills3). Never forget that in the 2022 election, she hauled in 109,620 votes—true believers, which might toss her the bone of second or third preference votes (we’ll get to the implications of that soon).…

James Posey, president of the local NAACP chapter (the organization that produced Hardesty), co-founder of the National Association of Minority Contractors of Oregon (beneficiary of “go to the head of the line” contracting race-preferences that might have a future date with SCOTUS). He’s run for mayor once before—2004, back when Portland was a nice little city—but there’s a new generation of go-getters, so let’s throw in…
Rukaiyah Adams, CEO of the newly-established 1803 Fund, which kicked off with $400-million from Nike co-founder Phil Knight (who was quoted in the local papers saying he wasn’t totally sure what the dough would accomplish). Ms. Adams says it will “Rebuild Albina,” which is curious, considering that Albina was a mob-run black ghetto back in the city’s bad old days. But anyone running that kind of money is de facto, a political player.

As mentioned before, with the primary merged with the general elections, there will be some long-shots. Just for fun, let’s toss in…

…Angela Todd of PDX.Real.com fame, if she gets tired of complaining about progressive misdeeds to her thousands of Instagram/Twitter followers and goes for the “we’re fed up” vote…

…and you can easily see where we’re going. Do any of these people seem like 50-percent-plus-one-vote types?

If not, consider these issues outlined by two professors of mathematics, David McCune and Adam Graham-Squire, in “Mathematical Flaws in Ranked Choice Voting Are Rare but Real,” on the Promarket website…

The [Alaska] election demonstrates several of RCV’s less desirable features, from a social choice or mathematical point of view. First, when using RCV, it is possible that a candidate can be hurt by receiving more support from voters.
Second, RCV is susceptible to the so-called “spoiler effect,” which is usually defined as an outcome in which the removal of a losing candidate from the election changes the winner.
Third, when using RCV, it is possible to have a set of voters that cause their least favorite candidate to win by ranking their favorite candidate in first place.

So, looking at our hypothetical ballot above:

How many candidates will neutralize one another, with their dead votes moving into yet another candidate’s column?
As voters grope through those six slots, how many voters will realize that, given the right conditions, they’ll make it more possible that their down-ballot picks will fluke in?

So the political pros in town will face an agonizing question: is be better to go for the majority(which doesn’t really exist)—or run as “second best,” or, “lesser of evils?”

Who will be the first to figure out the wisdom of the slogan, “Vote for whoever you like the most, but mark me second?

Despite the city spending around $5-million on the transition, including a “how to vote” campaign (which was supposed to start in the spring—if it exists it’s been very quiet), it is a fair bet that many of the city’s naive voters won’t know beans about the RCV scheme and its mechanics. There will be too many candidates; differences will be minute; ethnic rivalries will work their magic; minds will reel.

They’ll not only have to sort out the mayoral pileup, but figure out how to rank candidates for council in each of the districts (which have yet to be decided). How many candidates will dance on the head of a pin?

Plus, if voters put mopes such as, well…Hardesty or, for that matter, Wheeler in office, how are they supposed to be mentally able (or willing) to evaluate the dozen or more candidates who will leap out of the woodwork?

Portland Dissent

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