The Charter Commission and "Surplus Votes"

How you'll wind up voting for your second choice...if you're not "exhausted."

The Portland Charter Commission’s new Progress Report #5 came out recently—same weird cover, same bizarre conclusions. The hand-picked (for race, sexual-preference, progressive orthodoxy) group really didn’t have any “progress” to report, but that didn’t stop them from producing the same series of quasi-utopian promises for the new—and oh-so-much-better—government of Portland.

It is the Commission’s belief and desire that this proposal will make Portland’s government more accountable, transparent, efficient and effective, responsive, and representative of every area of the city.

We have written here and here and here and here about prior Commission pronouncements, which is many more words than our legacy media has elected to write about the Commish’s grand vision—and probably evidence of this writer’s obsessions. Take yer choice…

…which is the subject of this little drive through progressiveland. Because at the heart of the Commish’s cogitations is a wholesale change in the way we citizens will make the ultimate choices in what’s left of our local democracy.

The basic pitch of the Commish is twofold:

Our current way of doing business is fatally flawed and must be replaced. It’s not the progressive political machine’s fault that the city is in deep doo-doo, but rather that the “commission” style of city government has been wrong since the get-go.

The solution is to split the city into four districts (thus addressing the “east side problem”); with each district “represented” by three (count ‘em) “councilors.

The Commission is coy about where the lines will be drawn, for obvious reasons. You can count on it to be skillfully drawn to favor certain groups, but here’s one version by a research outfit called “More Equitable Democracy.”

Kinda big, aren’t they? It makes the Commission’s claims…

Having geographic- based representation could also lend itself to more localized and neighborhood-based constituent services and civic participation that is not dependent on Portlanders' ability to access downtown.

…seem a bit far-fetched.

Yah, there’ll still be a mayor elected city-wide, but that person—should anyone be dumb enough to run for that office—will be charged with running the city on a day-to-day basis, along with a professional city manager. The capon-mayor will have no City Council vote and will essentially be a convenient punching bag for the elected council.

It gets dumber.

These councilors will be elected in a new way. It’s called Ranked-Choice Voting and it is the darling of progressive types (which ought to be reason enough to regard it with skepticism) and political science academics.

We will explain how this system works—your head will nod as we penetrate its mathematical mysteries—but let’s hand the mike to the Commish…

Ranked choice voting would give a Portland voter the ability to choose more than one candidate to vote for, ranking the ones they like in order of preference by marking the ballot to indicate "1st choice, 2nd choice, 3rd choice, etc." for as many as they care to offer a preference. If a candidate receives a majority of the first choices, that candidate will be declared elected. If no candidate receives a majority, the candidate who received the fewest first choices shall be eliminated and each vote cast for that candidate shall be transferred to the next ranked candidate on that voter's ballot. This process of eliminating candidates and transferring their votes to the next-ranked candidate choices on ballots repeats until a candidate receives a majority of the votes from the continuing ballots.

Got that?

The Commish goes to great lengths to assure us that this scheme will be a kind of electoral snake-oil, sure to cure whatever ails the city…

There is also growing evidence that ranked choice voting promotes more civil, issue-oriented campaigns and decreases the incentive for negative campaigning…. Campaigns may be friendlier as a result of fostering stronger coalition-building and candidates even collaborating and aligning on policy platforms.

Note: the Progress Report doesn’t cite any of the “growing evidence.” And beware all political pitches that use the words “may be.”

The Commish says that ranked-choice (hereafter RCV to save keystrokes) is used in places like New York City and San Francisco and Minneapolis—obviously paragons of great government. It says that RCV…

As of November 2021, 43 jurisdictions used ranked choice voting in their most recent elections.

Odd thing about that slippery term “jurisdictions.” Try Googling that term and you’ll encounter dozens of variants, from New York city to the Fresno Sewage District. But—just for convenience’s sake, let us note there are, as of 2018, 19,495 incorporated cities in the US. So RCV is used in a whopping 0.22 percent of US city elections.

Nor does the Commish note that RCV was voted down in Massachusetts by about 10 percentage points. Or that New York city bungled the most recent election and announced false winners as the complex mathematics of voting unfolded.

Or that, according to a New York Daily News op-ed…

Some jurisdictions have repealed their ranked-choice voting laws following negative experiences. After an unpopular mayor of Burlington [Vermont] was re-elected with only 29% of the first place votes, voters repealed the system. The North Carolina legislature repealed their RCV laws in 2013, and the voters of Ann Arbor, Mich., did the same.

In Pierce County, Wash., voters repealed Ranked Choice by a thumping 71%. Aspen, Colo., rescinded RCV in 2009 by 65%.

If the Commish doesn’t want to share these little details, what else might be up their sleeve?

So here we go: deep weeds ahead!

Let us first note that Portland resides in three counties: Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington, who do the grunt-work of counting the ballots.

Let us not speak of Clackamas’s effort to produce timely results. But does one expect that all three counties will adapt to Portland’s RCV requirement for just City Council elections? Has anyone asked them about how they will modify their scanners and software? Or who will pay for it?

Nah.

Nor is the Commish candid when it comes to the first vexing question: how many candidates will be ranked?

In the last City Council primary, there were 11 candidates on the ballot in the hotly-contested election for Council position 3—basically a referendum on who might rid the city of Jo Ann Hardesty. Over in position 2, Dan “Ten Feet” Ryan faced eight opponents. Too many? Many jurisdictions draw the line at, say, four choices. Can’t clog the scanners, right?

Local media, manpower-short, has a built-in affinity for crowning certain candidates as “challengers.” How media arrives at this herd-definition is a mystery—even to journos. Ryan only faced one—a nut-case, even by Portland’s standards, so that simplified things.

Hardesty faced two candidates who got the media nod: Rene Gonzalez and Vadim Mozyrsky. Both had platforms and slogans and bullet-points—but it was clear that the real question was who would bump Jo Ann.

The other eight candidates? Forgotten.

And here’s the first problem that the Commish would rather not think about. Would voters have been asked to make eleven rankings of people no one has ever heard of, thanks to our local media? Doesn’t RSV hand an awful lot of power to both media and the deep-pocketed who can build name-recognition? Pay for ubiquitous lawn-signs? Mailers by the dozen?

Count on local media not to ask that question. Or for the teachers’ unions, trade unions, AFSCME, developers, or any of the other big-money players either.

And now we come to mathematics, “surpluses,” and “exhausted ballots.” Let’s allow the Commish to spell out the system…

Each candidate must receive a certain threshold of the total vote to be elected. The threshold is the minimum number of votes needed by a candidate to get elected, and in Portland’s districts would be 25% of the vote (plus one vote) to elect a candidate. The formula for determining the threshold is calculated by dividing the number of valid votes by the number of candidates to be elected plus one (this number will be 4 in Portland).

Huh?

If there are three councilors elected in each district…whence comes the 25 percent? Where’d that “4” come from? Why did I get a “D” in arithmetic in fourth grade?

Let’s dig the hole deeper:

After the first-choice votes are counted, candidates who meet the threshold in the first round have enough votes to win and get elected. If a candidate has more than enough votes to win that put their total over the threshold, these extra votes, called surplus votes, get transferred to the second-choice preferences of their voters. This means the surplus votes of each elected candidate are then transferred to the candidate whom the voter has marked as their next preference. If after all surpluses have been transferred and there are still open seats left, the candidate who received the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are distributed according to the next available choice on the voters’ ballot.

If you didn’t vote for any of the top vote-getters, your ballot will be what’s called “exhausted.” Tough luck: you’re out of the game, unlike other players who keep having their votes nudged ever-upward.

If this sounds like a system ready to be gamed, join the club. We’ll get to the reason for this legerdemain later.

Let’s go back to the Hardesty vs Whoever election.

Hardesty got 72,917 votes, 43.7%; each of her media-appointed challengers split the rest of the votes. Gonzalez got 38,649; Mozyrsky ran neck-and-neck at 37,135.

If this had been an election under the new charter, if everyone had qualified by living in the same district, then the top three vote-getters would have been elected to “represent” their hapless district.

Hardesty/Gonzalez/ Mozyrsky?

In the Commish’s La-Laland, this would mean…

Having multiple people allows for a greater chance that more viewpoints and experiences will be represented….Because multiple leaders would represent one area of the city, this would also increase opportunities for collaboration and coalition building for geographic-based issues between those leaders.

Wouldn’t you love to see what a coalition between those three might look like?

And, please answer: which one of these three will ya call with a complaint about potholes?

Let’s remember yet another flaw in the RSV scheme: the ability to game the system.

If you were Jo Ann Hardesty and knew you were vulnerable to a challenger who was “anyone else,” wouldn’t it behoove you to make sure that there were two “anyone elses” on the ballot to split the anti-Jo Ann vote?

Aside from guaranteeing a Jo Ann Hardesty a job for life, what’s the real game here?

As I’ve written before, the Commish is bare-naked when it come to one of its basic goals…

Increasing opportunities for communities of color to elect their candidates of choice has also been a driving goal for the Commission.

The problem facing the Commish is that Portland is just too damn integrated…

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.

So, next best thing: create a voting system that will magnify vote-togetherism. Make the breakup of the city into warring tibes more explicit. Draw the district lines in a racial gerrymander. Emasculate a mayor who could speak for all Portland citizens and let the tribes cut up the spoils.

If you read the Progress Report carefully (a thankless task), you will find this goal spelled out in no uncertain terms…

The Commission favored reforms that would more likely give smaller and historically under-represented communities a greater ability to form coalitions to elect candidates of their choice. Voters would see more candidates that are renters, younger residents, BIPOC and members of minor parties.

Aside from begging the question—when can we close the history books on under-representation, particularly with a majority-minority City Council—why does anyone believe that the progressive machine really wants “minor parties” cluttering up the show?

And: does anyone think that the progressive machine will put forward anything that will seriously challenge its iron-clad control of the city?

The Commish trotted out precisely one citation of what was called “research” in the report to support its proposal for those mega-districts…

….research findings [that] have been corroborated by the Tufts University Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG) Redistricting Lab.

And what did the Lab find?

• 12 member councils are likely to elect four POC-preferred candidates in close keeping with the POCVAP share of the city (4/12 = 33% of council seats). These projections are consistent both for three districts each electing four council members (3x4) and four districts each electing three council members (4x3).

Flip this on its head and bill it as a Charter that will guarantee eight white folks a permanent spot on the Council and you’d have a riot on your hands.

And a gross violation of the 14th Amendment…which stops at the state border.

The voters will have a binary choice on the November ballot—and don’t bother asking why the Commish ducked on letting the electorate rank-choice the various provisions of the charter.

And, given the multitude of districts, voting schemes, city manager, capon-mayor, don’t ask if Secretary of State Shemia “Scylla and Charybdis” Fagan’s “one-issue” test for ballot measures will be enforced, as it was for hapless People for Portland’s demand that Metro actually spend money on homelessness.

Nope: the City Council will happily vote to sign the suicide pact. And then—one shudders!—it will be up to the voters. They’ve never voted before for a new charter. But the electorate is changing—Portland’s population is, officially, down 11 percent—and the left-overs are the kind of people who gave a creature such as Jo Ann Hardesty 43.7 percent of the vote.

She’s got a job for life if the Charter passes and her opponents can’t stop playing dodge-ball (which is likely). Given the voters’ record—how’s legalizing hard drugs going?—you can take that one to the bank.