Q&A: How Portland’s ranked-choice voting works

PORTLAND, Ore. — Election Day is now less than two weeks away, and most voters in Oregon should already have their ballots. In Portland, this will be the first election in the city to feature ranked-choice voting, a product of the charter reform measure voters approved back in 2022. Multnomah County will follow suit with elections in 2026.

But for some voters now staring down the barrel of a massive grid of candidate names and bubbles, there may be some lingering questions about how the whole process works.

First, to recap, Portland’s government is undergoing a major overhaul come January. The current four-commissioner Portland City Council will expand to 12 members, three elected from each of Portland’s four new districts. There’ll be a new mayor, now overseeing a city administrator and six deputy city administrators who will run the city’s departments. City council members will no longer be directly in charge of bureaus — that’ll be up to the professionals. Instead, councilors will be focused on policy and interfacing with constituents.

Because it’s such a sweeping change, every seat in this new city government structure is up for election in November. All of them will be elected via ranked-choice voting, but the form differs depending on the office.

There are two types of ranked choice voting being used in Portland: single-winner and multi-winner. Single-winner is used in races for mayor and city auditor, while multi-winner is used for the city council — simultaneously electing three council members from each of the city’s four districts, no primary needed.

READ MORE: Portland to use ranked choice voting to decide mayor, city council election. Here’s how it works

Here are some questions we’ve received about the two different forms of ranked-choice voting, answered.

As mentioned above, Portland City Council races are multi-winner, and three council members will be elected for each district in this single election. One of our viewers asked if there’s any advantage to different orders for the first three candidates on your ballot, when all three could hypothetically be elected.

According to Multnomah County Elections, there is. Voters should rank candidates in order of preference, because the order does matter, perhaps especially for those first three.

The reason is that ballots are tabulated in rounds. In the first round, the county is only calculating voters’ first-ranked candidates. If any candidate has enough votes to cross the 25% threshold for election, tabulation continues until the other two candidates reach over 25% of the vote.

But if no candidate can pass the 25% threshold to win in a round, then the candidate with the least votes is eliminated. So, if you decided to rank your favorite candidate third for whatever reason, thinking they’d still get your vote, it might be too late when all is said and done — they could be eliminated in the first two rounds.

This question again concerns the multi-winner races for Portland City Council, which do add a layer of complexity over the single-winner races. For city council races, a candidate needs to surpass just 25% of the vote (25% plus one) in order to be elected, compared to 50% in the single-winner races.

In the multi-winner races, any votes the council candidates get above that 25% threshold are distributed out to voters’ next-ranked candidate using a little behind-the-scenes math.

The formula Multnomah County gives is essentially this: the candidate’s total votes, minus the threshold number of votes needed to be elected, then divided by the candidate’s total votes. 

An example that the county gives is that hypothetical candidate Sanae Smith needs 9,000 votes to pass the threshold. But in the first round, Sanae Smith gets 10,000 votes — so not only do they win election, they have a surplus. That’s when the surplus transfer formula kicks in. The threshold of 9,000 gets subtracted from their total of 10,000, leaving 1,000. That’s divided by the 10,000 total to get a “transfer value” of .1000.

For each voter who ranked Sanae Smith first, part of their vote stays with the winning candidate and a fraction, that .1000 number, gets passed on to their second-ranked choices.

It sounds complicated, but the purpose of doing this is one of fairness. The formula is an alternative to just scooping all of the surplus votes off the top. Instead, all voters who ranked Sanae Smith first can still say they contributed to electing them, not just the first 9,000 who had their ballots counted. They get a piece of that choice, and they get a piece of their second choice.

This is also done so no winning candidate ends up with a larger share of the vote; they are all capped at 25%. Using this formula, any surplus above 25% is shaved off and redistributed, but in an equal amount for each voter.

Alongside the ranked-choice Portland races on the ballot, voters will see a statewide ballot initiative, Measure 117, which would institute ranked-choice voting for state and federal races across Oregon. Several viewers have expressed confusion about how this works and if it’s different from what Portland is doing.

Based on the legislation that prompted this measure, House Bill 2004, Measure 117 would institute something very similar, if not the same, as Portland’s single-winner races for mayor and auditor. It would not have the extra complexity that the multi-winner races have, so no formulas there.

Voters would still rank their choices, and ballot tabulation would proceed in rounds. Just like the race for Portland mayor, a candidate needs to pass 50% of the vote to win. If they don’t achieve that in the first round, then the lowest-ranked candidate is eliminated and their votes redistributed out to voters’ second-ranked choice, and so on until someone passes 50%.

There are a couple of differences. First, Portland races are limited to ranking six choices — HB 2004 only said that voters can rank “as many choices … as practicable.” So, Measure 117 could conceivably allow you to rank more for statewide races, although the legislature could perhaps choose to limit that before implementation if the measure passes.

The other difference is that Portland races are nonpartisan, and ranked-choice voting eliminated the need for primaries. That won’t be the case for state and federal races if Measure 117 passes. There will still be closed party primaries in May; they’ll just be conducted with ranked-choice voting.

It’s worth noting that Measure 117 would only apply to races for President, U.S. Senator, U.S. Representative, Governor, Secretary of State, Treasurer, Attorney General and BOLI Commissioner. It would not apply to state legislative races.

Because of the way ranked-choice eliminations and surplus transfers are sometimes described, it’s understandable to think that your vote might be going to just some other candidate after your choice either wins or gets crossed off. But fear not — your vote will only ever go to someone you ranked.

All of the tabulation and calculations described above can sound complicated, but the data is all coming from individual ballots. When a candidate you ranked is eliminated, it is your vote going to the next person you ranked, nobody else — unless you didn’t rank anyone else, in which case your ballot is “exhausted” and your vote ends there.

And yes, your lower rankings may matter quite a bit. Depending on the race and the candidates, some or all of your top choices could be eliminated. At that point, your vote is going toward one of those lower-ranked options and could help one of them get elected.

That’s one reason why Multnomah County election officials have stressed that you should only rank candidates you could actually support to some extent. If there’s someone you absolutely don’t want to see in office, don’t rank them even as your sixth choice — there’s always a chance that your vote will get them across the finish line.

We have another story dedicated to just results and how they’ll be released, so check that out here.