More Dark Secrets of the Charter

Stuff they'll tell you if you're dumb enough to vote for the Charter

Let us begin our exploration with this invocation. It should be read before every so-called “debate” about the proposed Portland Charter…

Portland does not have a geographic distribution of BIPOC residents that could allow for a drawing of a majority BIPOC district, nor does it have the level of income or age segregation and stratification that characterizes other large cities.

These are words that have been reprinted in every “Progress Report” issued by the Charter Commission (or the ventriloquists who control the dummy, the Coalition of Communities of Color, which did the Commission’s “listening,” for a hefty tax-free fee). Short version: guarantee POCs a place.

How?

Play games with the vote.

We’ve been reading those “Progress Reports” for many months and, dammit, we’re still not sure how it works. Over at WillyWeek, reporter Anthony Effinger gave it a go and produced a colorful mishmash…

…which only deepened the mystery.

So let’s turn to one of our Substack neighbors and one of the charter’s rah-rah backers, Rose City Reform. It’s presided over by one Maja Viklands Harris, who describes herself, in a sort of giggly way, as…

…recovering journalist, policy nerd and a serial citizen advisory board member.

…but who neglects to mention that she is a member of the Multnomah County Charter Commission, which is even weirder than its Portland counterpart, possibly because some of its members are high schoolers.

Ms. Harris asks…

Can you feel it in the air?

Portlanders are getting ready to make a big decision.

And as voters ponder the Charter Commission’s ballot measure, many are asking: Exactly how would my vote be transferred?

…and thus begins her “Charter School.” It’s a by-the-numbers recitation of how obedient voters will “rank choice” candidates on ballots that will be full to the brim with favored POCs and also, given the nature of the city, people from the many far-flung sexual-choice, socialist, vegan, defund-the-cops, flat-earth, animal-rights, climate-catastrophe, everyone-on-bikes, stop-harassing-the-houseless, close-the-jails…there’ll be no end to it.

And—just maybe—an actual conservative might even take a spin on the opaque “voting machine.”

In your dreams.

The twist is that the top three candidates will be ranked—somehow—and will go on to “represent” each of the four mega-districts. If a candiidate hits 50-percent (plus one vote), they’re in—and any votes for them will be shuffled off to second-and-third choices…some fancy vote-counting there!

Ms. Harris gushes about the new system, then makes an astonishing admission…

There’s a reason I was vague about Portland’s proposed system. 

We don’t actually know the specifics of how vote transfers would work in Portland. Single transferable vote can vary between jurisdictions, and when new voting methods get adopted, the real nitty-gritty gets worked out after adoption.

In Portland’s case, the Multnomah County Elections Office and the City of Portland would need to work together to iron out the final details, and City Council would ultimately need to sign off on the plan.

Short version: Buy now. Pay later.

Ms. Harris turns for guidance to an expert— who, by the strangest coincidence, happens to be…

Maria Perez, co-director of Democracy Rising, a nationwide organization that helps jurisdictions implement ranked choice voting.

…which has implemented something called STV in mighty Eastpointe, Michigan (pop. 34,077.), which is basically a white-flight suburb just north of the hellhole known as Detroit.

Ms. Harris doesn’t mention it, but Eastpointe adopted a different flavor of voting (“RCV,” ranked choice voting) to settle a suit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. The goal was to increase—you guessed it—chances that a black candidate would be elected. Here’s what happened in 2020…

Notice, please, the number of “inactive” ballots; those are votes that got tossed for any number of reasons—your guess is as good as Ms. Perez’s. Also note that there was a minute difference (421 votes) in the top two vote-getters (and this was, after all, a first-past-the-post election, unlike Portland’s scheme). And that at the end of the vote-shuffle, Mas. Moore miraculously had 11,602 votes—a mandate!!!—but not for her as first choice. And almost half of the ballots wound up “inactive.” Somehow.

Is this a way to build confidence in a vote?

Ms. Perez also has strange-voting procedures teed-up in Albany (pop. 20,271) and Palm Desert (a giant at pop. 53,087), CA, the latter being a rich-folks enclave, median house price $532,500.

By golly, Ms. Perez understands this stuff!

“One of the interesting things about multi-winner ranked choice voting is this idea of surplus votes,” Perez says.

This is the part that the Charter backers don’t like talking about—presumably because the voters who are expected to master a vast ballot are a little too stupid to understand how the votes will hop, skip, and jump as the “voting machines” do their opaque work. Or as Ms. Harris says, with a sigh…

Thankfully, the voting machine does the math.

Of course, in real-life elections, numbers are more complex.

Votes may be transferred as fractions, or percentages with multiple decimal points. How many decimal points, and whether you round percentages up or down, are some of those intricate details that get worked out after adoption.

…worked out by yet another commission filled with the usual suspects. Not to worry!

If you don’t understand all of the inner workings of STV, don’t sweat it, Perez says.

Did anyone around here ever hear the expression, “The devil’s in the details?”

Here are a few things that make my stomach hurt when “policy nerds” get going with the rock upon which our republic rests—“one man, one vote.” (OK, make that “person,” since gender is now fungible.)

Every poll says that confidence in “the vote” and the way it’s administered is in deep doo-doo. Erode that confidence and the republic is on the way out. “Don’t sweat it” doesn’t answer that. But it leads to a second consideration:

This is the work of a stupidly-selected, racially-hypercharged (with a leavening of fringe sexual-activist) group of progressives—mostly too young to have any real “lived experience” and made up of hungry wanna-be politicos. (Call for you, Ms. Avalos!!!)

How dumb do you have to be to create four giga-districts in a city of tight (and under assault) neighborhoods…without specifying where the district lines will be. More work for yet another commission.

Let’s remind ourselves that each district supposedly will be represented by three (why three-don’t ask) Council people, two of which will be guaranteed a full vote on council after getting just 25-percent of the vote.

The new Council will deal with “policy”—fat chance, with every hyper-minority guaranteed a voice at the big table. There will be four “fifty-percenters” on the Council—the rest will be mathematical creations, the “25-percenters,” each answerable to a small but mobilized minority such as—sheer coincidence!—an outfit such as the Coalition of Communities of Color. Or AFSCME or the teachers’ unions, as if they didn’t have gobs of power already.

Think anyone who might want to challenge the status quo will be able to battle out of the slag-heap of the ballot? Has Rene Gonzalez gotten any real coverage from local media in a simple one-on-one with Commissioner Hardesty? Try adding 10 or 15 candidates into that mix. Chalk up a big gain for the slowly fading legacy media. Therese Bottomly must be grinning in anticipation.

But never underestimate the Portland voter. Whatta legacy! Legalize hard drugs and elect—overwhelmingly—a DA who doesn’t like prosecuting…

….they’re dumb enough to pass it.