On these fancy new ballots...

Author

Lisa Freeman
September 19, 2024

Team Lisa at the beginning of a fun day of canvassing in Multnomah Village, Rank Lisa #1!

Good Morning Friends -

Today, friend of the campaign and retired journalist Manny Frishberg is taking us on a quick tour of our new way to cast our vote for elected office in Portland. The City of Portland, Multnomah County, Community Partners, and just about Every Candidate I Know is doing their part to educate voters on the upcoming changes, and the related content list A+:

  • The County recently released this video.

  • There are several ways to practice, including here, and you can even cast a vote for Lisa here (in fact, please do!).

  • There is also this wonderful video made by Rose City Reform.

  • There is this beautiful comic.

  • There are events and presentations including one tonight!

Your ballot will look a bit like a scan tron from the old standardized tests we took in school, see below. Candidate names in a list on the left, with six columns of “bubbles” on the right. The order in which the candidates appear on the ballot was randomized, and Lisa pulled position 18. This isn’t particularly amazing news, but we are confident in our fourth district voters. We hope that you and many people like you will rank Lisa as number one, and then five other candidates as you see fit (we have recommendations if you want them ;).

Sample Mayoral Rank Choice Voting Ballot

Before I hand it over to Manny, I’ll just take a moment to list a few opportunities to help us get Lisa onto council:

  • Help us max out the public matching dollars by donating and encouraging your friends, partners and neighbors to donate.

  • Join the team by filling out this form, there is something for everyone. You can help us from the comfort of your couch, I promise!

  • Order a lawnsign

  • Rank Lisa #1 in this strawpoll. We feel silly asking, but we want to be included in the forum!

    THANK YOU! THANK YOU! - Jenn

Let us know if we can bring you materials for handing out or displaying!

Hello, and thanks for reading -


In a couple of weeks, Oregonians will start receiving their ballots in the mail, marking the beginning of what used to be called Election Day. It’s a long way since the days of standing in lines at schools and other public buildings transformed into one-day-only voting stations. For Portland voters, it will be one step further – into the city’s “natural experiment” of choosing the new government via ranked-choice voting.

Why go to an unfamiliar way to cast a ballot and elect leaders? If you have ever felt like you had to choose between “the lesser of two evils,” or that your vote was wasted because the person you prefer did not have the cache or the campaign cash to compete successfully, you already know the answer. Last December, political science

Professor Larry Jacobs, at the University of Minnesota told NPR that people are adopting ranked-choice voting out of a dissatisfaction with politics today, “driven by deep, almost existential panic about the demise of American democracy,” calling ranked-choice voting “the ‘it’ reform at this moment.”;

Portland isn’t unique or even the first to try this type of voting system. Alaska and Maine have both been using forms of ranked-choice voting. According to the advocacy group FairVote, close to 50 American locales, from small cities to the states of Alaska and Maine — have now moved to a ranked-choice voting system. Portland isn’t even the first in Oregon. Benton County approved a shift to ranked-choice voting eight years ago, and Corvallis is using it to elect their mayor this year from between three candidates.

In the Instant Run-off version of ranked-choice voting, the system adopted here, if one Mayoral candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, they win. But if no one gets 50 percent, the person who got the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated. Those voters are then added to their second choice, and so on until someone gets 50 percent-plus-one votes. In the case of City Councilor, since there are three seats in each district, the magic number is 25 percent instead of 50.

This guarantees that whoever is elected was at least among the top six choices of at least a quarter of the district’s voters. If that’s not a perfect democracy, it’s certainly more fair to more people than the old “first out of the gate” majority-rules election. There, with 23 candidates vying for just three seats, the winners might only need to get 5 percent of the vote.

Manny Frishberg