Salem City Club looked at ranked choice voting, which is on November ballot

Last Friday ranked choice voting was discussed at a Salem City Club program that featured Shannon Grimes from the Sightline Institute in Seattle, where she focuses on electoral reforms in Washington and Oregon. 

This November Oregonians will vote on Measure 117. If approved, the measure puts ranked choice voting into effect on January 1, 2028. Measure 117 was referred to voters by the 2024 state legislature, where it was passed on a party line vote, aside from one Republican who voted with the Democrats.

So what is ranked choice voting? Here's an explanation that reflects what I heard Grimes say. 

Measure 117 requires that ranked choice voting be used for partisan primaries and general elections to federal and state offices, including the president, U.S. senator, U.S. representative, governor, secretary of state, attorney general, state treasurer, and commissioner of labor and industries.

For some reason, the Oregon legislature exempted itself from being subject to ranked choice voting. Cities, towns, and other local governments can use ranked choice voting if they desire.

Currently Benton County, which includes Corvallis, uses ranked choice voting in local elections. In the upcoming November election, Portland voters will use ranked choice voting to elect a mayor, auditor, and three councilors to represent their district. Nationally about 50 places use ranked choice voting. 

Grimes said that 80-90% of people say ranked choice voting is easy and they like it. Voters perceive campaigns as less negative, since candidates have to appeal to more than their most avid backers given that ranked choice voting moves from whoever gets the most votes (which could be as low as 20% in a race with many candidates) to whoever gets the support of a majority of voters (since as shown in the example above, votes for the lowest ranked candidate are allocated to other candidates until someone gets at least 50% + one vote).

Grimes added that underrepresented candidates (such of people of color) tend to run and win more under a ranked choice voting system as they don't have to worry about being a spoiler candidate. That probably explains why the endorsers on the Yes on 117 web site include many organizations representing the underrepresented, along with progressive, environmental, and civic groups like the League of Women Voters.

TIME magazine offers a few examples of how ranked choice voting likely would have affected the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections.

The most notorious example of this [spoiler effect] is the 2000 presidential election, when nearly 3 million mostly left-leaning voters cast their ballots for third-party candidate Ralph Nader. If ranked-choice voting had been in place at the time, Democrat Al Gore may have prevailed in the key state of Florida, where neither Gore nor Republican George W. Bush won a majority of the vote, says Don Saari, author of Decisions and Elections.

(Florida was the center of a vote-counting scandal, and Bush’s narrow win there ensured his ascension to the White House, despite losing the popular vote nationwide.)

“Gore was the second-place choice of many of Ralph Nader’s supporters, particularly in the states of Florida and New Hampshire, where Bush narrowly won,” says Saari. “A goal of Nader’s Green Party was to reach a certain percentage of the total vote, which is a reason why many Nader voters did not want to vote for their second-ranked Gore.”

...Because it helps eliminate vote-splitting, a ranked-choice voting system can have the effect of encouraging more third-party and centrist candidates, advocates say. Michael Bloomberg, a centrist, third-party candidate, considered running in the 2016 presidential election but decided not to upon concluding that he might split the Democratic vote with Clinton, increasing the chances of Trump’s victory. (Trump, of course, still won the election, though he lost the popular vote to Clinton.)

Again, the 2016 election offers a good hypothetical example. If a ranked-choice voting system had been in place in Michigan, then Clinton, not Trump, may have won that state. Because neither candidate received a majority of the Michigan vote, ranked-choice voting would have come into play. And if we can assume that most Stein voters would have chosen Clinton as their second choice, the former Secretary of State would have won, according to Saari. Trump won Michigan by 10,700; Stein received more than 51,000 votes.

Though these examples are of how ranked choice voting could have benefitted Democratic candidates, and Alaska is considering doing away with ranked choice voting after it led to a loss by Sarah Palin in a special election to fill a seat in the House of Representatives, which ended up being won by a Democrat, an avid local Democrat, Aileen Kaye, sent me some reasons to oppose Measure 117 after I'd asked her to do this, knowing from a question she asked at the City Club program that she isn't a fan. 

Why I will vote “No” on M. 117, Ranked Choice Voting

1. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  As an active member of the Oregon and Marion County Democratic Party, I am very grateful that we Dems hold all the statewide offices, including the governorship, the Oregon House, and the Oregon Senate.  The Marion County Democratic Central Committee voted last week to oppose this measure.  There is no good reason to change Oregon’s election system. 

2. Legislative leadership was paid BIG bucks to vote for this.  They took the money and voted for it; but they omitted themselves from having to be elected via Ranked Choice Voting!  And no one can find out the names of the contributors to the PAC’s who lobbied hard for this!  I think the push and the money is NOT from Oregonians.  

3. Having gone door-to-door for the past many elections, I will tell you most voters pay little attention to government/elections.  They also do not like voting for people they know nothing of.  To have several choices for an office will result in many voters throwing up their hands and not voting for anyone for that office.

4. It will be very expensive!  There is no mention of this and there is no info on from where the funding would come. 

5. Election workers are already very stressed due to the MAGA election-denying culture.  This will this add to the stress because there is no way we will get election results the night of the election due to Ranked Choice Voting.

Lastly, if you want to experience ranked choice voting with dessert preferences, scroll down to Example #3 on this Ballotpedia article. I was shocked that people are rating ice cream above cake, which obviously is the best dessert. (Cake did make it to the third round, where it was knocked out in favor of chocolate and ice cream, the winner.)

Comments

[Richard van Pelt]

I agree with Aileen, though my reasons are different. Mine are rooted in the politics of human nature and the philosophy and political theory that gave us our electoral system.

The late Kris Kristofferson penned and sang lines that describe the world of our electoral system: “. . . a walkin’ contradiction, partly fact and partly fiction”

Those who framed our Constitution struggled to create a process that would bring out the better nature of the citizens and the leaders who would emerge from among us. They failed. They were not alone in failing. The process is as likely to bring out the worst in us as it does the best.

I live in a legislative district where my 'representative' ran as both a Republican and as a Democrat. The problem every voter faces in every election is to examine those who seek to be their tribunes and distinguish which are wolves in sheep's clothing.

Ranked voting opens the door for deceptive candidates to pose as one party when in fact representing something altogether different, leaving the voter in November with no choice at all.