Tim Scott 'Splains It All

...except for who to pick out of the mob on this November's ballot. But remember his words: "If you don't want someone to win, don't rank them."

Tim Scott is the Multnomah county director of elections—the guy whose machines will slice ‘n’ dice the upcoming votes for mayor and the next city council.

He’s been counting votes for over 20 years. If vote-counting is your bag, he’s got many stories about cliff-hangers, premature victory claims, and even one dead heat tie that withstood a recount.

This next election will be a first for Scott — and for the city.

The sample ballots that dropped last week…

…took many people by surprise (including us). It brought home the massive job ahead for even the most well-informed voters — how to sort and rank up to 30 candidates in the districts plus 19 candidates for mayor.

For most of us, even political junkies, the ballots look more like a telephone book (remember them?) full of mostly unfamiliar names. Picking one winner out of all this “noise” would be tough enough, but voters will also be asked to “rank” up to five others in some sort of hierarchy ranging from “OK,” to “barely tolerable.”

As we shall see, there is danger in that “ranking.” And ample opportunity for the bugbear of unintended consequences to rear its head.

A few people on the laundry-lists (30 of ‘em in a couple of districts) are old familiars (Novick, Ryan, etc.), others are agitators on the downslope from the halcyon days of ‘21-’22 (Avalos, Morillo), along with nobodies, at least one homeless dude, and a stripper.

In all, depending on the district in which a voter resides, this could mean figuring out 49 or more candidates for four jobs.

Really?

By a typically large margin, Portland’s voters approved this new system in 2022. Now they’re trying to understand what they voted for. The job of explaining how this all works—or is supposed to—falls to Scott. Lucky us: In my experience, he’s the champion responder in the city or county bureaucracy. Ask a question and damned if he doesn’t write back — not through a flack — and tries to supply an answer. Remarkable.

So we ZOOMed for an hour or so recently, and he answered my questions patiently, although he has probably been asked the same dumb things dozens of times.

Here’s a recording of Scott explaining how this new system will work…give it a half-hour of your life and you will understand what will happen after you drop the hefty ballot package into the mail…

• 1:42, when the counting begins and how long it will last, and the “shelf”

• 3:14, what’s different about this count

• 7:18, the “jar of marbles”

• 9:18, surplus transfer and “large numbers”

• 10:00, how the algorithm works, the “threshold”

• 13:55, the “new algorithm”

• 15:55, “fractions,” and redistribution

• 17:55, “It’s not my job”

• 18:55, problems for prognosticators

• 21:13, the TV crew in the basement, and “too close to call”

• 23:20, “political junkies” and strategy

• 24:50, “Don’t vote for someone if you don’t want them to win”

Scott is an engineer; he’s not going to talk about whether Ford should have created the Pinto — he’s there to figure out how to make it run.

So his admonition to “Don’t rank someone you don’t want to win” is about as close as he got to the political arena. But it’s advice that voters should consider very carefully — especially in the mayoral race. It certainly rearranged my thinking, and put the business of “ranking” the pols into a whole new—and somewhat unsettling—perspective.

For that, let’s go north to Alaska.

As that state’s fling with ranked choice voting amply demonstrated two years ago, when two leading candidates are highly polarized (in this case, warring factions in the ruling Republican party), then a third candidate stands a very good chance to win. To everyone’s surprise.

In the first round of a special ‘22 Alaska election¹ with three candidates vying for the state’s only Congressional seat, two Republicans, Begich and Palin,² fought a bitter campaign; Peltola was the Democratic party nominee:

Between them, the Republicans took 59.8 percent of the vote. No surprise, Alaska has been a red state since statehood. In traditional “first past the post” voting, Palin would have won.

But under RCV, numbers don’t count—the system must find a winning percentage, a “threshold,” of 50 percent plus one vote.

No one met that requirement. Thus, the vote-shifting began; the candidate with the fewest votes was eliminated—bye-bye Begich—and everyone who indicated second choices on the Begich ballots had those votes shifted to that candidate.

Republicans who hated Palin, and vice versa, either didn’t rank anyone else, and were thus dealt out of the game—”exhausted” is the word of art. Some voters, who had never heard Scott’s mantra, “If you don’t want someone to win, don’t rank them,” picked Democrat Peltola second. And lo, all of Begich’s third-place votes moved inside the elections division’s computers…

…and Alaska, for the first time ever, elected a Democrat. Who is now up for re-election. Meanwhile, the GOP has wised up: Party leaders twisted arms to produce just one candidate to oppose Peltola in November. The party, wised up and forced RCV back into, effectively, first past the post. Meanwhile there is a serious effort underway to repeal RCV.

Let’s take a leap of imagination to look at the close (by historic norms) 2022 Oregon governor’s race. Democrat Tina Kotek won, but by an old fashioned plurality (which progressives now loathe): 47 percent of the vote. Republican Christine Drazan got 43.6 percent and maverick Betsy Johnson got 8.6 percent. Johnson started fast out of the gate, but ran a lousy campaign and local media started trumpeting that she was a loser.

The main event started looking close, which also winnowed away Johnson voters. Then Kotek got a last-minute $500K contribution, brokered by Sen. Wyden, from some shady (and soon to be imprisoned) characters in a bitcoin scam; plus money from the marijuana creeps at LaMota. Shemia Fagan, their good friend and secretary of state, was later thrown under the bus.

Kotek, never Oregon’s most lovable politician, squeaked in.

Clearly, on round one (had this been an RCV contest), Kotek wouldn’t have achieved the magic 50 percent plus one vote. Ominously, the clear anti-Kotek vote (Drazan, Johnson) was a majority: 52 percent.

Johnson would have been the odd woman out on the second round, but the question would be: how many of Johnson’s voters would rank Kotek or Drazan their second choice?

If most of Johnson’s support was anti-Kotek protest votes, Kotek would have been in trouble; after all, Drazan would only need 6.4 of the Johnson votes to punch through.

And, supreme irony—Johnson would have decided the election—and would, for the first time in three decades, cracked the progressive machine’s dominance of Oregon politics.

This ought to keep Salem pols awake at night — unless they’re legislators. Last year, they passed House Bill 2004, creating Ballot Measure 117 to ask voters to approve Ranked Choice Voting for federal and state-wide offices. They exempted members of the state Legislature from RCV. Ya gotta wonder why.

Think forward to future elections if Ballot Measure 117 passes in November (Only Oregon voters are dumb enough to approve something before it passes its first test in Portland).

Here’s one scenario: Kotek manages to stumble a few more times and is seen as a vulnerable incumbent. The party primaries will be run under RCV, and if Kotek doesn’t clear 50+1 in round one, then another happy middle candidate will probably emerge on the second or third round. Is Nicholas Kristof still interested in the job?

Will that be the strongest candidate in the general election — particularly if the Republicans can keep nut-cases from messing up their primary?

And forget about the basic question: would this produce the best person to run a very troubled state? Not if the voting system essentially punishes controversial, polarizing candidates.

Here in Portland there are already an indication of what might be called the “Peltola Effect.” With Rubio and Gonzalez being crowned as the leading candidates by dinosaur media, and with the stark differences in their politics and backers (in one local district’s parade of wanna be councilpersons, Gonzo was actually booed when mentioned), then the search is on for Number Two.

That’s why the wimpy Keith Wilson is on the debate stages…and, of course, there’s Mingus Mapps, trying very hard not to make anyone mad but still remember his name. And who, presumably, has the black vote in his hip pocket, while Hispanics will split between Rubio/Gonzo.

And just for humor (with the ghost of Bud Clark in mind), there’s Liv Osthus, aka Viva Las Vegas, the stripper. (It might feel kicky and oh-so-Portland to rank her…but remember what Scott said.)

Who knows what the first RCV election will teach the professional pols, who will, as always, be doing their best to game the system. So will voters: one of RCV’s admitted problems is something called “strategic voting…”

While RCV aims to reduce the spoiler effect by allowing voters to express preferences for multiple candidates, it does not eliminate the potential for strategic voting entirely. In scenarios with multiple candidates, voters might still strategically rank candidates to influence the outcome, particularly if they believe their top choice will not advance.

We’ll confidently predict there will be surprises—hopefully for the folks from the City Club and public unions and the Coalition of Communities of Color who floated RCV and its opaque cousin, single transferrable vote, past the mopes on the charter commission.

It will be a reminder that the basic error of our progressive overlords is ignoring the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences.

Which 118 politicians are about to discover.

Meanwhile, remember Mr. Scott’s wise words…

If you don’t want a candidate to win, don’t rank them.

1. The incumbent Republic Congressperson, Rep. Don Young, died in office, triggering a special election.

2. Former vice presidential nominee on the McCain ticket.