Portland’s failed ranked-choice voting experiment
by Harry Roth
Portland adopted ranked-choice voting in 2022 via a City Commission-led ballot initiative. This past November, city residents used the system for the first time, and the results were abysmal to say the least.
As many have predicted, voter engagement took a real hit when Portlanders cast their ballots last month. One in five voters left the entire city council slate blank. Engagement crashed even further in poverty-stricken East Portland, disenfranchising the city's poorest residents.
The candidate who ended up winning the Portland mayoral race, Keith Wilson, won by receiving the most third-place votes after 19 rounds. That’s even worse than when Oakland’s recently recalled mayor, Sheng Thao, won in 2022 by receiving the most second-place votes after nine rounds. This highlights one of RCV’s biggest flaws. It creates a winner by manufacturing a majority after eliminating and reallocating votes. Many of Keith Wilson and Sheng Thao’s voters may have known very little about them and only ranked them to avoid having their ballot exhausted.
Portland gave $210,000 to pro-ranked-choice voting organizations to help them educate city residents ahead of the election with very little effect. A similar situation occurred during the 2021 New York City mayoral primary race, where over 140,000 ballots were tossed even after the city spent $15 million on a voter education campaign. And just like in Portland, poorer neighborhoods in NYC saw the lowest levels of voter engagement.
With ranked-choice voting ballot measures failing in six states this year, advocates for the system are likely to pivot towards pushing it on the local level. If states don’t take action to ban it, we could end up with most of our major cities using RCV.