Portland will be using Ranked Choice Voting to elect 12 new City Councilors, it's Mayor and City Auditor on November 5th.
And for councilors, there will be multiple winners in each district’s race – the three most popular in the district. Counting these ballots, or tabulating them, is a bit more complex than normal, but it’s something the County Elections office has been working on for a couple years.
Each winning city council candidate needs to earn 25 percent of the votes in the district, plus 1 – that’s the threshold. Voters will have the ability to rank 6 candidates. Votes are counted in rounds. In each round, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated, and their votes redistributed to their supporter’s next best choices.
One of the selling points of Ranked Choice Voting is that it allows people to support candidates they really care about, even if they may not be the most likely to win. But in the multi-winner races, voters shouldn’t be afraid of ranking popular candidates highly for fear of wasting their vote.
If a candidate reaches the threshold, their excess support, or surplus votes, get proportionally distributed to their second choice. That helps to ensure that the three winners are the three most popular candidates from the district.
The City Council winners in Portland will also likely take some time to determine. Ranked Choice Voting needs all the ballots to be collected and counted before calling a race.
How many ballots are turned in and ‘tabulated’ by election night depends on voters. Some estimates based on past trends would indicate 50 or 60 percent of votes will be in by that time.
Even though final results will take some time to count, Multnomah County Elections will release regular updates on the ballots they’ve counted so far, with information on who is leading the race.
Want more? Check out this explainer video from Rose City Reform.