{"id":12634,"date":"2024-11-12T11:51:22","date_gmt":"2024-11-12T18:51:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=12634"},"modified":"2024-11-14T21:15:56","modified_gmt":"2024-11-15T04:15:56","slug":"ranked-choice-appears-to-impact-voter-engagement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=12634","title":{"rendered":"Ranked choice appears to impact voter engagement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hailed as a way to break up the 2 party system, encourage more moderate candidates, and improve voter engagement<\/a> – Portland embraced ranked-choice voting<\/a>. Despite it having been tried in numerous locals since the early 1900’s – it has often been later repealed<\/a>. So how did it work for Portland?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were 2 ranked choice selections this year: your district city council member and mayor. Each had nearly 20 candidates. An entire front and back page of the ballot were just those 2 races. Unfortunately, it appears the exact opposite happened with regards to engagement. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Despite getting up to 6 total rank votes and having 19 candidates, 1 in 5 voters who cast ballots chose no one for Portland city council which was far more than in the previous two city council election cycles. For mayor, 11% of returned ballots didn’t vote for any of the 19 mayoral candidates compared to 6% in the previous 2020 election. In short, voters almost doubled the rate of leaving a position blank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was interesting is that Portland had between 50-85% voter participation, with many districts in the 80% range – which is very encouraging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, I do think Ellen Seljan summed up my own experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cMy overall conclusion is that the voters were overwhelmed, found the system and number of candidates too hard and didn\u2019t feel confident in their vote choice,\u201d said Ellen Seljan, a political science professor at Lewis & Clark College. \u201cThe easier thing to do is to skip those races entirely.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I can confirm it required a TON more work sifting through the nearly 40 candidates for the 2 offices. I didn’t skip any races, and did rank all the folks I was interested in. It exhausted me enough I did it in chunks over a few days. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sadly, many of the candidates were clearly fodder: single issue candidates, extreme candidates, completely inexperienced candidates, and unknown candidates. Too many didn’t submit statements or have a website. We had one candidate that wanted to tear down\/convert city infrastructure to bring back horses and let homeless help manage them. Another guy was an unemployed legal student living in his parents basement (his own words).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think the big failure is the lack of information – critical information. With no other info, I found myself looking some of the people up in LinkedIn or checking if they have a criminal record. You have to do all that vetting yourself – a dangerous lack of information as many voters likely don’t have that time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oregon Live has more interesting charts and data:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.oregonlive.com\/politics\/2024\/11\/portlands-ranked-choice-debut-causes-voter-engagement-to-crater-1-in-5-who-cast-ballots-chose-no-one-for-city-council.html?gift=b5be0308-e613-4099-ace9-f5de966b4b63<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hailed as a way to break up the 2 party system, encourage more moderate candidates, and improve voter engagement – Portland embraced ranked-choice voting. Despite it having been tried in numerous locals since the early 1900’s – it has often been later repealed. So how did it work for Portland? There were 2 ranked choice selections this year: your district city council member and mayor. Each had nearly 20 candidates. An entire front and back page of the ballot were…<\/p>\n

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