Brady Vinlove/The Mossy Log
In 2024, the City of Portland implemented changes to the city’s governance structure and election methods. Part of this adjustment included adopting the ranked choice voting system for city elections. To better understand the significance of this change and engage with students, on Nov. 20, the Lewis & Clark Political Science Department hosted a conversational event discussing its impacts and origins. The event featured four members of the political science faculty: professors Ellen Seljan, Todd Lochner, Leah Gilbert and Ben Gaskins. Additionally, two guest speakers presented — Marina Kaminsky and Shannon Grimes.
Kaminsky is the research manager for the North Star Civic Foundation, a Portland-based organization which works toward a more open democracy and a just and equitable market economy through a variety of local projects. Grimes is a senior researcher specializing in democracy and elections at the Sightline Institute, a think tank focused on the Cascadia region aiming to promote sustainability.
Gaskins facilitated the conversation, kicking off the event by asking Kaminsky and Grimes to give a brief history of Portland’s decision to implement ranked choice voting. Kaminsky explained that every 10 years, a commission is formed to examine Portland’s charter — a document that acts as the city’s constitution. This commission then makes recommendations for changes to the charter in the future.
In 2020, this commission found that many Portlanders felt underrepresented and that the city government was inefficient. The group recommended expanding the number of city council members from five to 12, with three representing each geographical district of the city, and shifting councilors’ roles to focus on setting policy.
The commission also proposed using ranked choice voting for all city elections. Under this system, voters can choose multiple candidates and rank them by preference. The mayor’s and auditor’s races would use single-winner ranked choice voting where a winner must earn over half of the votes. City council elections would use multiwinner ranked choice voting where a candidate must earn over 25% of the votes.
In 2022, voters chose to adopt these measures. When the next general city election took place in 2024, ranked choice voting was used for the first time in Portland.
Grimes added that the greater number of city councilors and the voting system was especially intended to give residents of color the chance to have their votes heard, which she sees as a benefit of the ranked choice system.
“One of the reasons they decided to do multimember districts with proportional rank choice voting was because then, within those districts, people of color would have enough voting power to be able to elect representatives and council members that they supported,” Grimes said.
After this overview of the topic, Seljan presented research she, Gaskins, Gilbert and Lochner, as well as students Jules Replogle ’26, Peyton Broll ’26, Syd Schubbe ’26, Zane Emerson ’26 and Clio Petty ’26 did examining this shift in Portland’s elections. The group also presented their research at the American Political Science Association meeting earlier this fall. Their research sought to examine how voters chose who to vote for in Portland’s ranked choice election of multiple city councilors.
Seljan then gave an interactive presentation to encourage audience engagement and participation. She started by asking the audience to think about why the 2024 Portland ballot was difficult for voters to understand, and explained that each city council race had about 20 candidates.
Delving into the research process, she said they looked at the raw voting data to see how voters ranked different candidates and compared information about candidates to try to understand what factors influenced voting.
The researchers worked with endorsement data, measuring how many endorsements candidates received and from which groups — these could be other candidates, minor or regional political parties, labor unions, or media organizations. They also considered candidates’ demographic information, money spent on campaigning, prior government experience, ideology and pledges for a specific policy agenda. Seljan also asked the audience what they thought mattered in how people selected candidates, facilitating a conversation about the impact of different factors.
Finally, she summarized the findings with a chart and highlighted the two key factors they found to impact voting.
“Endorsements are extremely important, as you guys predicted,” she said. “We think the demographics (of the candidates) actually mattered too.”
Seljan emphasized that these are “early research conclusions” and the team wants to further examine the data and compare it to previous years’ elections.
After this exercise, the conversation shifted back to Kaminsky and Grimes who shared their reactions and insights into the 2024 Portland election. Grimes shared that the hope was for the new system to allow more diverse viewpoints to be represented and research from the Sightline Institute showed how ideologically varied the new council is.
“I think we really do see that the council was a portrait of the city in miniature, which is kind of the ideal of what a representative government should be, and that came to fruition more than we even expected it might,” Grimes said.
Kaminsky was pleasantly surprised that voter turnout remained similar to past city elections, despite the possibility that the change could be confusing to voters. The two guest speakers highlighted the work the city did to educate voters and establish the system as something that aided this turnout.
However, they noted that this election had so many candidates, including many not seriously hoping to earn a seat on the council, which gave voters a challenge as they had to learn about several options and make decisions. Kaminsky also noted how she thinks the shift to ranked choice voting has been unfairly attributed to problems in Portland by national media.
“I think there’s been a little bit of conflation around what’s causing different things that we see in the city because, in reality, it will take multiple cycles with this election system to see what are the impacts. I think there’s been this rush to try to attribute different things that are happening in the city to the election system,” she said.
The event ended with a question and answer portion from the audience to engage them in the conversation. Attendees — mostly students — were curious about how socioeconomic status impacted voter turnout and Kaminsky and Grimes explained that turnout was mostly consistent with previous years, but was lower in eastern Portland.
“In District 1, we did see turnout was a little bit lower than maybe we would have expected compared to previous years and taking into account the overall turnout at the national level. And that is an area where, as I mentioned before, there are more people of color, it’s lower income,” Kaminsky said. “Some misinformation got out there that I think did confuse voters about how to use the ranked choice ballot.”
They mentioned that the city hopes to do more voter education in this area in the future.
Finally, they addressed how Portland could become a model of the ranked choice voting system and propagate it further. Kaminsky and Grimes reflected on the positive attitudes towards the new system and speculated on how this could inspire more shifts.
“Voters seem to really like the new system,” Kaminsky said. “I think over the next few election cycles, voters will continue to get more comfortable with it. I do think that Portland stands a chance to become a model in this way for other cities that are considering ranked choice voting.”
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