Here Are the Seven City Council Candidates Who Spent the Most Public Dollars Per Vote

Nearly 100 candidates ran for Portland City Council this year. By the end of this week, we should know for certain who the 12 councilors are.

We already know one thing: The high number of candidates seeking city office was expensive. The city’s public campaign financing program, Small Donor Elections, was stretched thin, delivering a total of $4.1 million to 78 candidates. (They qualified for taxpayer dollars by gathering at least 250 small donations.) The purpose of the public money was to help level the playing field by letting candidates without deep-pocketed backers deliver their message with mailers and online ads.

Some of those messages didn’t get through. To calculate who spent the most per vote, we used an extremely simple equation: the amount of money raised through the Small Donor Elections divided by the number of first-place votes received by the candidate. (Keep in mind that about 4,000 ballots out of 347,626 cast remain to be counted.)

Here are the seven candidates who had the highest ratio of money raised to votes received.

Chris Henry, District 4: $131 per vote

Money raised: $38,709

First-place votes received: 295

Moses Ross, District 4: $126 per vote

Money raised: $71,994

First-place votes received: 569

Nabil Zaghloul, District 2: $103 per vote

Money raised: $83,142

First-place votes received: 805

Stan Penkin, District 4: $78 per vote

Money raised: $83,070

First-place votes received: 1,061

Ahlam Osman, District 3: $58 per vote

Money raised: $40,266

First-place votes received: 685

Laura Streib, District 2: $48 per vote

Money raised: $33,081

First-place votes received: 687

Luke Zak, District 3: $47 per vote

Money raised: $25,735

First-place votes received: 543