Funding awarded to 11 Portland groups for ranked-choice voting education

The Portland Votes 2024 Grant Program has awarded $210,000 to 11 different organizations to support education efforts about ranked-choice voting. The adoption of a new city charter has changed multiple aspects of city government. One of the most prolific is that in November, voters will participate in a ranked-choice voting process to choose city council members, which is different from how many people are used to voting. Direct voter education grantees, including APANO, NAYA and Urban League of Portland, will provide culturally- and language-specific educational opportunities about the new system to the communities they serve, while other grantees will hold broader voter education efforts. Grace Ramsey, co-founder of Democracy Rising and the project manager of the grant program, joins us to share more about these educational opportunities.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In just a little over two months, Portland voters are going to get ballots in the mail that are different than any they’ve gotten before. Because of voter-adopted changes to the city charter, elections for mayor, auditor and city council will all be based on ranked-choice. In order to make sure that people know how this new system will work and how to fill out those ballots, the city gave more than $200,000 to nonprofits for voter education.

Grace Ramsey is a co-founder of the national organization Democracy Rising. She was chosen to manage Portland’s grant program and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.

Grace Ramsey: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Miller: Let’s start with the basics here – voting for mayor and auditor. That’s going to be simpler than for city council. Can you give us the sense for how those two races are going to work?

Ramsey: Sure. Well, I’ll say on the front end, for the voter it’s exactly the same process. With ranked-choice voting, instead of our elections where you just pick one candidate, voters are able to rank candidates in all of those elections in order of preference. So whether you are voting for your three city council members in your city council district or mayor, auditor, that ranking process will be exactly the same. The thing that is different, as I just said, is how many people you will be electing through that process.

Miller: What are ballots going to look like?

Ramsey: Ballots in ranked-choice voting elections across the country look a little different from place to place. But Portland has really followed what has emerged as a best practice and what voters will largely see is a grid. On the left side of the grid, you will see all of the candidates’ names. And if you move slightly to the right, you will see a header that says “rank one” and you will be able to fill in an oval for your first choice in that column. When you finish with that, you will move to the right, you’ll see a column that says “rank two.” That is where your second choice goes, so on and so forth. Voters can rank up to six candidates on the ballot.

Miller: The city – or maybe it was the county, I forgot – has put on a website a kind of sample version of a ballot that people can practice on. The difference is this is fully online. So you’re just taking your mouse and clicking on an oval, which darkens as opposed to a pencil. But nevertheless, when I did that this morning, totally by mistake, I filled in for the fake candidates, I think 1st, 2nd, 3rd and then 5th. I’d forgotten to do the 4th. And the computer gave me an error message saying no, that’s not valid. You didn’t actually put a 4th place. If I did that as an actual voter with an actual ballot, would my ballot not be counted?

Ramsey: Your ballot would absolutely be counted. So the way that the ranked-choice voting will operate in Portland is really making sure that we hear voters’ voices as much as possible. So if you were to skip that ranking, what we would do is, if it came down to your 4th choice candidate … which would take a lot of time in that election, we can sort of get into that later. But if you skipped that ranking, we would go to the next highest ranked candidate on your ballot. So if you fill in an oval for a candidate, that is an indication of support and the protocols in place will ensure that it is counted even if you happen to make a slight error like that.

A lot of times, the online platforms and things like that, we really want to model the best behavior, but we recognize that errors happen. So there are practices in place to make sure that your voice would still be heard in that situation.

Miller: Oh, that makes me happy because that’s exactly what I wanted the answer to be. But what if somebody puts the first choice for two of them? Then what happens?

Ramsey: Absolutely. So, first of all, a lot of the work that we’re doing is to make sure that we’re getting ahead of any voters feeling like they have to make a choice like that. So in the months leading up to the election, we want to get out there and model for voters how this is going to work, how their ballot is going to work and prevent any possible errors that we may see. One of those could be that you rank more than one candidate for, let’s say your first choice. If that were to happen, we would ignore that ranking because we can’t determine your intent as a voter and we would move to your next choice on your ballot. So even if that were to happen, if you had backup choices ranked on your ballot, we would be able to go to those and your voice would still be heard in that election.

Miller: Wow, your voice would be heard, but probably not in the way you wanted it to be heard. But the ballot wouldn’t be invalidated and you wouldn’t be told there was a problem. Your third choice would become your first choice?

Ramsey: Yes. So, if we can’t establish intent, we can’t make an assumption for you. That can’t be the role of election administrators. But exactly, that is not exactly what a voter would want in that situation. So, a lot of the work that we’re doing in the months leading up to the election is to really get out their model, answer those questions in advance to make sure that voters are aware of how to do that and kind of getting ahead of folks who may make a similar choice.

Miller: OK. So what about the way somebody should approach that ballot? Let’s say for the city council races that there are three candidates who I really love. And I don’t have a ranking in my head. I want all of them to win. I don’t care about any of them more than any others. I don’t like the other candidates, let’s say. How should I decide who to put first and who to put third of my three favorites?

Ramsey: I mean, with ranked-choice voting, while it does give you a lot more to say with your ballot, we are still asking you to play favorites. So if those three are really neck and neck, it’s up to you to determine the criteria of how you can determine who your favorite really is. That may be endorsements that those candidates have received, that may be maybe who lives closest to you and understands the needs of your particular neighborhood, whatever it may be. But there you can only rank one first choice, one, second choice, one third choice and so on.

For voters, I would view those rankings as approval for people that you like and people that you want to support. If you don’t like a candidate, as you mentioned, if you like that series of candidates and you don’t like others, don’t rank somebody that you don’t want to support on your ballot. So as far as that goes, there’s different ways that voters can approach it, but I find that honestly ranking whoever is your favorite and then from there, your backup choices, is always the best way to approach it. I’ve been in a lot of situations with folks kind of gaming out different ways to approach it and usually we go around in a pretty large circle and end up back at the beginning of finding who your favorite is. If you can’t have your favorite, who’s your next favorite? And going from there.

Miller: Can you explain how the surplus vote counting system will work for these races, for the city council races, where there will be three winners in each of the four new districts?

Ramsey: Sure. So ranked-choice voting in the way it’s being used for City Council is a proportional system. That means voters are going to get representation in proportion to their strength in the electorate. Part of how that system works is, if a candidate does really well … and actually, I’m going to use this mostly from the voter’s perspective rather than the candidate. If a lot of voters feel very, very similarly about a candidate and they have more than enough support to earn one of the seats, a proportional system says, well, maybe that group of voters should also have some say on another one of those seats. If a candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, and those voters feel a certain way about a set of policies that that candidate puts forward, we don’t want to cap their representation. That’s such a large part of the electorate.

So that surplus transfer is the way that we make this proportional. And we have those voters’ opinions factored in beyond just that one candidate because they’re such a large group.

Miller: You’ve been doing voter education of this kind for ranked-choice voting systems as they’ve been implemented around the country for more than a decade now. Have any of those places you’ve helped had a system quite like Portland’s?

Ramsey: Yeah. Portland is taking on a really bold change by enacting several things at once, which I find personally very exciting and a bit jealous of at times. But yeah, so my first experience with ranked-choice voting was in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So they passed ranked-choice voting in 2006. They used it once in 2009. I was really introduced to it in 2013 when they had an open seat for mayor, and many city council races and races all the way down the ballot that were extremely competitive. And actually Minneapolis for their parks board uses the system and they have at-large seats. They have three at-large seats on their parks board. So they use the multi-winner version of ranked voting for that three member at-large seat. It’s actually very, very similar in terms of how it’s used. And that was my first experience with it.

Now, a lot of places across the country that I’ve worked for do use the single winner form of this, like we’re using for mayor and auditor in Portland. But in recent years, I’ve also seen a lot of communities exploring this proportional kind of ranked-choice voting for situations when they’re electing more than one seat for office. It’s my first experience and then in recent years, I’ve definitely worked in several communities that were using this kind of ranked voting.

Miller: I want to turn to the voter education effort that you help manage, grants for the $210,000 in taxpayer money that was given out. How did you decide who should get those grants?

Ramsey: Yeah, so to be clear, management is a word we can use, but it was a team effort and I want to really highlight that throughout the process. So a team consisting of myself. The program that we’re working in, the contract was awarded to Portland United for Change and I am working with Portland United for Change in that effort. So we had representatives from the city, the county and our sort of group of folks working on this project.

We had over 30 applications come in for this funding, which was thrilling to see and amazing to see so many folks from across Portland interested in wanting to engage their community in this process. We had a review process within that committee where we scored those applications. Everyone kind of viewed that separately, came back together and made decisions about where we would allocate that funding. There were a lot of voices in the room and it’s one of those where it can be an involved process to make these decisions. But I’m really proud of the time and the thought that was put into it. And I think we came up with a great group of folks that are doing this work now.

Miller: The grantee organizations who will be reaching out to specific populations, they focus on African American Portlanders, Latinos, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, Native communities, refugee and immigrant communities, and queer artists, including queer artists of color.

I was struck by the fact that two large groups of potential voters were not on the list – low income residents and older people – because you could easily make argents that these are both groups who could benefit from targeted outreach and education when it comes to a very new voting method. Why weren’t they included?

Ramsey: There was a set list of priority populations that the city put out in their request for proposals. So we really wanted to cover as many of those as possible. But with limited funding, we had to make tough choices at the end of the day of what organizations were capable of doing and that outreach. I will say the League of Women Voters is one of our grantees and in their approach and application, actually, seniors were a pretty specific part of that. So I would say that we’re doing a lot of work with that community. And many of our organizations actually do work specifically in low income communities. So while we may not have someone who specifically engages those communities and doesn’t have that necessarily in their title, efforts to reach all of the priority communities that the city put in that RFP are top of mind and part of the work that we’re doing.

Miller: I mean, it’s worth pointing out though, just in terms of the allocation of money, the League of Women Voters who, as you say will be reaching seniors as some of the folks that are going to be helping, they got $5000. A group that is going to be providing education specifically to queer artists got three times that much.

But I do want to move on to another issue in the time we have left. How do you think this new election system will change the way candidates talk to each other and talk to voters?

Ramsey: I can tell you some of what I’ve seen in other places. I have seen some places where there were dramatic shifts in candidate behaviors and some places where it was more subtle over time. So it’s not a one size fits all and what’s going to happen or how things change.

What I can tell you is with ranked-choice, voting incentives change. Oftentimes, if it is one of those head to head races where it’s me against you and I need to make sure that I shore up my base and go after any undecided voters in the middle, the incentives are pretty clear. Tell those undecided voters that you’re bad, and that they shouldn’t vote for you, and all of those things. So that’s the incentive to pull people over to my side by whatever means are necessary.

With ranked-choice voting, it’s not necessarily quite as simple because you are building out that support, you have to reach that threshold to be elected and you have to think sometimes creatively about how you’re going to build that coalition of support for your campaign. So some things I’ve seen are candidates really being in tune with issues more than sort of those personal attacks. I’ve seen a lot of candidates actually learning from one another throughout the campaign process. I think sometimes of candidate forums I saw when I was in Minneapolis where almost over the course of a campaign season, you would see not necessarily policy platform shifts, but a lot of understanding be built between candidates on different approaches to tough issues. And beyond that, we’ve even seen situations where candidates say, hey, I would like your first choice. I’m running to win this seat. But if you’re going to rank me first, I encourage you to rank this candidate second because we’re really aligned on issues, and we want to make sure that they’re, they’re at the forefront of your mind when you’re voting.

So a lot of those are different from our sort of traditional election system that we see. That being said, it doesn’t always mean that everything is going to be holding hands, and getting along, and agreeing on everything. But I have seen the temperature come down a little bit around the discourse and really focusing on issues.

Miller: Grace Ramsey, thanks very much.

Ramsey: Thank you.

Miller: Grace Ramsey is a co-founder of the national organization Democracy Rising and selected by the city of Portland to be the project manager for Portland Votes 2024.

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