Measure 117 would bring ranked choice voting to Oregon by 2028

Measure 117 on the Oregon ballot would implement a system of ranked choice voting for all federal and statewide races in Oregon by 2028. The Yes campaign says it’s an idea whose time has come. Portland voters passed a new system of government which includes electing the mayor and city council members using RCV. And Multnomah County will soon be choosing elected officials this way as well.

Opponents of the measure raise a range of concerns, from county clerks who say there’s no infrastructure or funding to support this major voting change, to those who don’t agree that ranking candidates leads to a more democratic result compared to the traditional winner-take-all method.

Sara Wolk is the executive director of the Equal Vote Coalition, which opposes Measure 117, and Isabela Villarreal is with the Next Up Action Fund, formerly known as The Bus Project, which campaigns for the measure. They both join us to discuss Measure 117.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: We turn now to Oregon Ballot Measure 117. It would implement ranked choice voting for all federal and statewide races in Oregon by 2028 – meaning elections for president, Congress, governor and other races would be conducted using this system. The “Yes” campaign says it’s an idea whose time has come and has, in fact, already arrived in plenty of jurisdictions around the country, including most recently in Portland. Opponents have put forward a range of concerns including cost and complexity.

Isabela Villarreal with the Next Up Action Fund is here. That is a nonprofit that supports the measure. Sara Wolk is the executive director of the Equal Vote Coalition, which opposes Measure 117. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Isabela Villarreal: Thank you so much.

Miller: Isabela, first – what is the problem that you’re trying to solve?

Villarreal: All Oregon voters deserve the freedom to vote for who best represents us and our communities. But there is a real feeling that no matter how we vote, our voice really doesn’t matter. And that’s because our current voting system doesn’t empower Oregon voters to choose candidates that would best serve us. But that’s really what Measure 17 aims to address.

Miller: Why doesn’t it empower us to choose candidates who would best serve us?

Villarreal: I think we see this in a lot of different elections where you might really love this candidate, but they might not have the best chance of winning. So instead of being able to actually vote for who you think represents you, your values, you’re left voting for someone that doesn’t necessarily do that. And we think that’s a fundamental issue in our democracy right now that we really need to address, to ensure that people actually have more voice and choice in our elections.

Miller: Sara, before we get to the remedy that has been put forward as Measure 117, do you agree on the diagnosis of the problem?

Sara Wolk: Yeah, absolutely. Vote splitting and the spoiler effect is at the root of what we want to solve as well. Here at the Equal Vote Coalition, we do research and voter education on this topic. But our concern is that ranked choice voting doesn’t actually solve the problems that it sets out to and it introduces some new problems in the process.

Miller: So let’s get to, first of all, what ranked choice voting is, something that some Oregon voters are already familiar with, maybe increasingly in some big population centers. Isabela, remind us how ranked choice voting would work for the kinds of elections that we’re talking about here, for president, for U.S. Senate, for Congress, for governors or Secretary of State?

Villarreal: Measure 117 is really just a simple nonpartisan upgrade to our elections. Like I said before, voters are often faced with choosing sometimes what we call the lesser of two evils. And rank choice voting can help eliminate that. So it’s very straightforward, you just rank candidates in order of your preference. You’re able to choose backup choices so you can ensure that your voice is heard in our elections. And like you said, Dave, it’ll apply to statewide federal races and would begin in 2028. So when voters are looking at the ballot, they’ll see ... it’s to be determined, the amount of candidates people can rank, but you’ll just say, “This person is my number one. This person is my second. This person is my third.” Just choosing people that you would really like to see in office.

Miller: OK, that’s just the first part of that, the voters role. But how are they tabulated?

Villarreal: It ensures that a majority of voters support a candidate. Right now, we have a lot of candidates elected to office with way less than half of the votes. So if, in the first round, outright there is a winner, more than 50%, we see that. That candidate just wins. Done. But if that doesn’t happen, we would look at the candidate who gets the least amount of votes. That person would then get eliminated and then people’s next choices would be counted, if they ranked someone.

Miller: So the people who put that person as their first choice, the person who came in last, those voter’s second choices would then be added as if they were first choices. And then if somebody is over 50%, then that person, that candidate is the winner?

Villarreal: We go until there’s a majority of people electing and supporting a candidate. Exactly.

Miller: Sara, do you have any quibbles with the way this has been described?

Wolk: I do. And it’s not just me. The Oregon Supreme Court has ruled that that claim, that the winner will have a majority of the vote, is false with ranked choice voting. And studies show that when there are multiple rounds coming into play, actually, a majority of ranked choice voting elections don’t elect a majority preferred winner. And the reason for that is that in those elimination rounds, you’re not just eliminating candidates, you’re also eliminating voters.

So to break that down, some voters' next choice may be gone already. Depending on the order of elimination, your vote might transfer but my vote won’t. And so that’s fundamentally unfair.

Miller: Walk us through what you mean by that. Say I voted. My first choice candidate came in last. What are the circumstances in which my second choice candidate wouldn’t be considered?

Wolk: So if I like a really strong candidate who doesn’t ultimately win, maybe my favorite comes in second place at the end of the day, then my vote will be counted as my first choice through all these rounds of tabulation. And then by the time my favorite is eliminated, my next choice is gone already or my next choices are gone already. And when people describe this, most people assume, OK, if my next choice isn’t counted, it wasn’t relevant. But in fact, especially in the close competitive types of elections we have in Portland, in Multnomah County, and in Oregon for our executive elections, when there are multiple viable candidates, it can actually eliminate the candidate who was preferred over all others, right off the bat.

That’s what happened in Alaska. The first statewide ranked choice voting election that ever they held ...

Miller: Isabela, let me give you a chance to respond to this.

Villarreal: Thank you. So as you know, Dave, in our current choose-one elections, voters do not get backup choices, which fundamentally means if their candidate does not finish in the top two, they do not have a say between front runners. Ranked choice voting addresses that. All of your votes are counted towards the final tabulation to ensure that people actually have a voice in our elections. And because voters rank candidates they prefer higher, each ballot only counts towards the highest ranked candidates on the ballot, at one time.

So you can rest assured. We’ve seen over 50 jurisdictions use ranked choice voting. Over 13 million voters use ranked choice voting with great success. This has not been an issue. And overwhelmingly, people and voters prefer ranked choice voting to choose-one elections because of the benefits of it.

Miller: You can’t do a real time experiment with a voting system. You can’t A/B an actual election because that’s unconstitutional. So how do you measure, in a rigorous way, the impact that a change in a voting system has? And Isabel, you can take this first … and then Sara, I’d like to hear from you as well.

Villarreal: Like I was saying, we know that Oregon voters deserve a greater say in our democracy. And we’re fundamentally faced with this issue where we can’t express our preferences on our ballot, which leads to a host of different issues. So across the United States, we’ve seen success with ranked choice voting, like I said, where voters prefer it because they can actually share their true preferences. They can ensure that people getting elected to whatever position it is, truly represents them in their communities …

Miller: When you say, “Voters, they’re happy,” you mean like polls have been done after there’s a change and, in those polls, voters say, “I’m happier with the new system”?

Villarreal: Exactly. There’s been many exit polls that have shown that voters are happy with the system. In New York City, they found that 95% of people said ranked choice voting was easy to use. So we see place after place really liking ranked choice voting. We also know that this does benefit Communities of Color and women, with ranked choice voting in different cities. We see more People of Color and more women getting elected to city councils. We see this in New York. We see this in San Francisco.

Miller: How do you explain that?

Wolk: Can I …

Miller: Sara, I’m going to give you a chance to respond to all of this in just about 40 seconds.

Villarreal: Our current system can be really exclusive sometimes. And sometimes there’s a worry that you’re a spoiler candidate or you’re vote splitting. So people feel encouraged to run for office. Right here in Portland, we see so many different people from so many different backgrounds being able to run for City Council. And because the system actually enables people to work together and to actually run on their values and ensure that they’re not facing the same types of barriers as they were previously.

Miller: Sara Wolk, there’s a lot for you to respond to and now is your chance.

Wolk: Isabela is making the argument that voters like being able to show their preferences and polling shows that. And that’s absolutely true. But that doesn’t mean that ranked choice voting has been tried and worked. Ten states have now banned ranked choice voting. It’s been repealed in over 18 jurisdictions, or dozens and dozens, if you’re counting the preferential version as well. And we’ve had massive failures where the election officials actually mistallied the election, didn’t catch the error, reported incorrect results and it went into a massive scandal.

So we saw that in New York City where they accidentally counted 135,000 extra ballots and they didn’t notice. And we saw that in the Bay Area too, where they’ve been using ranked choice voting the longest. They actually mistallied all of their elections and they didn’t catch it. So this is a very convoluted tabulation that really prevents our election officials from being able to do their jobs effectively and check their work as they go.

Our current elections here in Oregon are the gold standard for voting reform for the whole country. And it really is a model that other places look to. Election security is one of those things that we currently do really well. Measure 117 specifically strikes the entire section in Oregon law that requires local tabulation of ballots, that requires full transparency of results down to the precinct level.

And even Benton County, which is currently using ranked choice voting, is out of compliance with this law. And we called them up and asked, “Why? Why aren’t you publishing the precinct level results for the multiple rounds?” And they said, “That’s impossible. Ranked choice just doesn’t let you do that.” We just don’t know if information is gonna come into play until you centralize all the ballots, and that’s a huge security risk …

Miller: I wanna put a pin, for just a second, on the question of whether the final tabulation is happening at the local or the state level, because that’s an important question I want to get to in just a second. But Isabela, first – Sara just said 10 states have banned this form of voting. More than a dozen have repealed it in some other way. She also talked about miscounts or major problems in New York City and in the Bay Area. What’s your response?

Villarreal: I want to be very clear with listeners. Regardless of what our opposition is saying, ranked choice voting is a popular nonpartisan voter reform. Let’s first acknowledge that voters have the freedom to vote and have the right to it. Creating any barriers to accessing the right to vote, especially banning a certain type of voting, is fundamentally undemocratic.

We’ve seen foundations, like Heritage Action, Leonard Leo’s Honest Elections Project, and others driving these bans to put up barriers to access, including ranked choice voting, including things we love, like mail-in ballots. So fundamentally, to say that states are just banning this, ignores the whole picture that there are far right wing entities that are pushing this to suppress voters. So let’s be clear about that.

Secondly, there are human error issues with ranked choice voting. Sometimes this happens in our current system as well. We’ve seen issues in New Jersey. We’ve seen issues in California with miscounted ballots. It’s a human error. None of these things are fundamentally an issue we cannot overcome. We are well set up to run ranked choice voting elections. They’re already happening in Oregon. We have it in Benton County. We have it in Corvallis. Tim Scott, our elections director in Multnomah County, has shared publicly, numerous times, that they are implementing this as well, they’re on timeline, and it is feasible to do.

Miller: Let me turn to the question of local or Salem [centralized] tally of the final tally of the votes. Ranked choice ballots, my understanding is, they’d be counted by clerks and then reported to the state, which would then provide the final tally for state and federal elections.

Rochelle Long, the Klamath County clerk who has led the effort to bring election officials' concerns forward to the public, told OPB that this might delay the process of final counting and also lead to complaints that local officials aren’t doing the final tally. One of the things she’s talked about in the past, even on this show, is people saying to her, “I sort of trust you because you’re not Salem. You’re somebody I know, in my local jurisdiction, in my red county. But I truly don’t trust people in Salem.” Why not keep local tabulation?

Villarreal: That’s a great question. The claims about ballot tabulation and local control typically kind of miss the mark. Results for races that include multiple jurisdictions, like statewide or federal elections, are already added together at the state level. The use of ranked choice voting does not change that. So, yes, we will be able to have a new system where people are adding things fully together at the state level. But that’s not a difficult change. It doesn’t mean that our elections are less secure.

Our elections will continue to be secure. We’ve seen Maine and Alaska using statewide ranked choice voting with success. This shouldn’t be an issue and it’s certainly not an insurmountable one. And again, it’s why all the clerks that are running ranked choice voting elections have not come out against this measure. They know it’s a feasible thing to do. And I do want to say that I understand that the clerk’s job is difficult. We really look up to the clerks. We think they’re incredibly important parts of the democracy ecosystem. But we also know that ranked choice voting is a very feasible thing to implement.

Miller: Sara Wolk, your response?

Wolk: I’m gonna read a quote from the Oregon Association of County Clerks. They testified publicly to the legislature, and urged them to vote no on this bill and to not put it to the voters. And they said, “Elections should be acceptable, simple, affordable, predictable, secure, auditable, and yield timely and accurate results. RCV does none of these things.” This is a huge red flag and I don’t wanna be the bearer … I mean, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

We do support preference voting. We do support upgrading our election system, and trying to combat vote splitting and the spoiler effect. But going through and ramming through an outdated 150-year-old broken proposal that has failed around the country, is a step in the wrong direction. It undermines the ability to pass good reforms that do hold up, when we kick the tires, later.

So we do support … there’s better ways to tally ranked ballots in which you actually count all the rankings. There’s other methods like STAR voting that Isabela’s super pac actually opposed in Eugene. They spent over $130,000 to defeat STAR voting, which is another great reform that the Oregon Election Integrity Caucus for the Democratic Party recommended that’s been used in statewide primaries in Oregon already, and that the Portland Charter Commission even recommended over ranked choice voting. So when we have these massive floods of out-of-state dark money ramming through this version of ranked choice voting, that we know is broken, that has failed around the country, and that does undermine our election security, that’s a huge red flag.

Miller: Isabel, you’ve got about a minute-and-a-half left.

Villarreal: Great. So again, let’s be clear. This is a successful reform. I don’t believe in fear mongering voters. I believe in voters finding out the information for themselves and we encourage you to do so. There’s a reason that there are over 125 organizations, labor unions and respected leaders that are in support of this. Non-partisan groups like The League of Women Voters of Oregon, the City Club of Portland, SEIU, and so many others are supporting this measure because we know that you as a voter deserve to have more of a say in our system. And ranked choice voting has been a proven success. Sara can throw out red herrings all day. But overwhelmingly, evidence shows us that voters like it, it’s easy to use, and it’s something that you as a voter deserve to have.

This was referred to voters from the State Legislature. The Secretary of State reviewed it. There was public input in hearings. This has gone through an extensive public review process to be the measure you see on your ballot, hopefully tomorrow. And we do hope you vote for it. You can always find out more at yesonmeasure117.com.

Miller: Isabela Villarreal and Sara Wolk, thanks very much.

Villarreal: Thank you.

Wolk: Thank you. Vote “no.”

Miller: Isabela Villarreal is policy and communications director for Next Up Action Fund, formerly The Bus Project, which supports Measure 117. Sara Wolk is the executive director of the Equal Vote Coalition, which opposes this measure.

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