A sign for a ballot drop box at the Multnomah County Elections Office in Southeast Portland on Monday, May 16, 2022. Election Day is November 8 for the Oregon general election. Sean Meagher/The Oregonian

Multnomah County residents will be asked this November to consider changing the way candidates are chosen in county elections.

The ballot question asks voters if “elections for county offices (should) give voters option of ranking candidates in preferred order, with instant-runoff vote-counting process determining results?”

While the ballot language might seem confusing, advocates say the change would allow no vote to be wasted and provide a platform for minority or lesser-known candidates to have a fighting chance.

Currently, whichever candidates receives the majority of votes, more than 50%, wins the race. If no candidate receives a majority in their primary election, the top two candidates move on to the general election. When there are more than two candidates, voters may feel that they are wasting their vote if they back a lesser-known candidate rather than choose between the two with the most name recognition and financial backing. So, to ensure a vote counts, voters might cast a vote for a candidate who is not their top choice.

Ranked choice voting aims to eliminate that system of voting for the lesser of two evils and instead make voters feel confident in supporting who they truly wish to elect.

It works like this: Instead of voting for just one person, the voter would rank who they want in office from their top choice to their last choice. When votes are counted, if no candidate received more than 50% of vote, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and those who voted for the eliminated candidate will have their second choice counted as their vote. The process continues until a single candidate has earned a majority.

It’s a system already in use in many places, New York City, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Oakland. So far, Benton County is the only county in Oregon that uses it to select county commissioners and the sheriff.

If the ballot measure passes, Multnomah County would begin using the new voting method in 2026.

City of Portland voters will decide on a ballot measure this fall that would switch the selection method for mayor to the same system being proposed for the county. The city measure would change the select method for city council members to a different form of ranked-choice voting that requires only 25% to win and is not used in any major U.S. city.

Nina Khanjan, who was a member of the Multnomah County charter review committee, said she voted to support sending the proposal to the ballot after the volunteer committee looked at how they could make voting more representative of the community.

“I think it would be a positive change if you could rank candidates,” Khanjan said, who is a registered Democrat. “If there is more than one progressive candidate than you could potentially vote for multiple progressive candidates and still even if your first choice didn’t get voted in, you’d still have a chance to get your second option into the position so you wouldn’t lose your vote.”

Annie Kallen, who was also on the review committee, said she initially was a big supporter of ranked choice voting but after doing more research has since changed her mind.

“Ranked choice voting is meant to prevent vote splitting and make elections more representative and those are great goals, but the problem is, I don’t think ranked choice voting does that,” Kallen said.

Kallen said one candidate might get eliminated before all their potential votes could have been counted since votes are counted in rounds moving from people’s first choice on to their last, if needed. She said there is another other voting method, called STAR voting, that is similar but counts all voting data at once instead of in rounds.

But Richard Clucas, a politics professor at Portland State University, said the chance that ranked choice voting skews the outcome of a race because votes are counted in rounds is very small.

“No election system is a panacea, problems can occur in any type of system, but ranked choice voting is a much better system than what we have to both improve and provide representation,” Clucas said. “It does a much better job ensuring that all votes count.”

While it doesn’t entirely end vote splitting, he said, it does a much better job at protecting against it.

“When using (the current system), you routinely have groups of people not represented especially if they don’t have a majority,” Clucas said. “Currently, you have people getting elected in the current system who get a lot more votes than needed to get elected because people don’t think they can vote for who truly represents them … What’s on the ballot would get closer to representing what voters really want.”

The League of Women Voters, the Coalition of Communities of Color, a half-dozen local political science professors and the head of Reed College’s Elections and Voting Information Center all support the measure. There is no organized opposition.

Nicole Hayden can be reached at nhayden@oregonian.com.

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