Electoral System Reform: Voters in the Portland, Oregon area have approved two local ballot measures that will implement a sweeping set of changes to the electoral system in both Portland and surrounding Multnomah County, along with reforms to the structure of the city's government itself. By a 58-42 margin, Portland voters have passed Measure 26-228, which amends the city charter to reshape balance of powers between the mayor and city council while adopting ranked-choice voting for both offices, which will additionally implement a form of proportional representation for the council.
Currently, candidates for mayor and the Portland’s legislative body, known as the Council of Commissioners, compete in nonpartisan primaries where a subsequent runoff between the top-two finishers is held if no candidate wins an initial majority. The mayor and the four Council members each lead different city bureaus with the assignments being given out by the mayor, who almost always takes the police commissioner spot.
But Measure 26-228, which was drafted by the local charter review commission, will end the Rose City's status as the last major city in America to still use this commission-based system in city government, which is a legacy of the Progressive Era. Under the newly adopted reform, the mayor will be elected using ranked-choice voting and instead will supervise an appointed city manager who will run the bureaus.
Meanwhile, the Council will expand from four to 12 members elected under a variant of proportional representation called single transferable voting, which uses ranked-choice voting in multi-seat districts. Under this plan, each of the four districts will use a ranked choice process until there are just three victorious Council candidates left per district, effectively meaning it will take at least 25% support for a candidate to get elected to one of the three spots, replacing winner-take-all elections with a system allowing more political diversity.
Portland will thus become the first major American city in many decades to adopt a form of proportional representation, which was once more commonly used in the mid-20th Century in dozens of major cities including New York City but has since been repealed in all but the smaller municipality of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Proportional representation is very commonly used in many other countries at various levels of government, though, and Portland’s newly adopted system most closely resembles the variant used to elect Ireland's parliament.
Meanwhile, voters in Multnomah County, which contains all but about 2,000 of Portland's 653,000 residents and also includes some of its adjacent suburbs, have passed Measure 26-232 by a 69-31 margin to adopt the single-winner form of ranked-choice voting for county offices. Consequently, almost all Rose City voters will now use ranked ballots for both their city and county elections.
Finally, in an ironic coincidence, Portland, Oregon wasn’t the only city with that name to adopt proportional representation on Tuesday. By a 64-36 margin, voters in Portland, Maine also approved Question 4, which amends their city charter to direct the City Council to adopt a similar PR system using ranked-choice voting in multi-seat districts. Several other cities and counties across the country also voted on their own electoral system reforms on Tuesday, the results of which we will cover in a subsequent Digest.