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Two candidates for the Portland City Council this November achieved something unusual—and, at first glance, illogical. Chris Henry and Moses Ross each received more individual campaign contributions than they did votes on Election Day.
Ross received 987 donations, most of them $5. Henry received 591 donations, also mostly Abe Lincolns. And thanks to Portland’s public campaign financing program, Small Donor Elections, which matches donations by up to a 9-to-1 ratio, those contributions allowed Ross and Henry to unlock a lot more money: $80,000 in taxpayer funds for Ross, and $38,709 for Henry.
The idea was that the public money would level the playing field for candidates who had lots of supporters but not deep-pocketed donors.
But that support was a mirage. On election night, only 668 Portlanders cast votes for Ross. Only 335 Portlanders voted for Henry.
The November election was an experiment in several new flavors of democracy. Portlanders are still debating the effects that ranked-choice voting and district-based elections had on voter turnout, and it will take some time to see how an expanded, 12-member City Council performs.
But this much is clear: The case of Henry and Ross, coupled with two other examples of candidates mining taxpayer dollars by boasting grassroots support that wasn’t there, shows that the city’s well-intentioned public finance system buckled under the weight of 75 candidates attempting to tap in.
An examination by WW, which also exposed abuses of the system in stories published over the past two months, raises questions whether Portland’s campaign financing is functioning as intended—and if it adequately safeguards taxpayer dollars from candidates with little public support but a creative approach to math.
Jason Kafoury, a lawyer who’s helped craft major campaign finance reforms, says: “What needs to come about are new rules banning collusion between candidates, their campaigns, and their agents regarding any public funding.”
Susan Mottet, director of Small Donor Elections, defends the program and says the Portland Elections Commission, an advisory body to the program, evaluates any needed changes after each election.
“The requirements for certification are intended to strike a balance: not to exclude candidates who have meaningful levels of community support, but not to include candidates who don’t have meaningful levels of community support,” Mottet says. “A perfect line—one that excludes every candidate who does not have community support but includes every candidate who does—may not exist.”
Portland’s first foray into public campaign financing, in 2006, was torpedoed by a candidate named Emilie Boyles, who raised $145,000 in matching funds via the city’s “Voter Owned Elections” program, but spent $12,500 to pay her daughter to conduct searches on Google. And her campaign manager was later convicted of 10 felonies for forging qualifying signatures.
In 2010, with Boyles’ abuse of the program top of mind, Portland voters repealed it.
Six years later, the City Council decided to take another stab at public campaign financing.
As part of its research, council staff met with the think tank Sightline Institute, which had championed Seattle’s public financing program just a year earlier. Seattle’s program gave each registered city voter four $25 “democracy vouchers” to assign to the candidates of their choice, funded by a small property tax generating $3 million annually. At the time, Seattle hadn’t yet run an election with the new program.
Kristin Eberhard, formerly the director of Sightline’s climate and democracy programs, recalls meeting with Portland City Council staff and urging them to consider the Seattle model.
“I recall them saying, given that there was drama and scandal around the previous Portland system, they were very gun-shy about doing something new that wasn’t proven and might run into problems,” Eberhard remembers.
The Portland City Council, led by then-Commissioner Amanda Fritz, decided to go another direction. By a 3–2 vote, the council created the Small Donor Elections program in 2016. Its modest budget came from the city’s general fund, and it was first implemented in the 2020 election. (The two holdouts—Commissioners Dan Saltzman and Nick Fish—argued the program should go to voters for approval.)
Portland’s program works like this: Candidates who receive 250 or more donations qualify for public funds, multiplying each eligible donation up to $20 by a factor of nine. That means a $5 contribution becomes $50 and a $20 donation becomes $200.
“We set this up so that people who didn’t have access to money would run, and that happened,” says City Councilor-elect Steve Novick, who also served on the City Council from 2013 to 2017. “I feel good about it just because of that.”
This year, Portland’s public financing program collided with another innovation. Thanks to a 2022 voter-approved ballot measure that overhauled the city’s form of government, 12 newly created City Council seats appeared on the ballot. A flood of candidates joined the race beginning in late 2023. By the filing deadline in August, 98 candidates were in the hunt for 12 seats. Another 19 candidates were running for mayor, and two for city auditor.
The City Council declined to provide Small Donor Elections with additional funding to handle the larger wave of office seekers, so the Portland Elections Commission scaled back the amounts available to each campaign.
Candidates were unhappy. Early on, they brainstormed how to scrap for name recognition.
Over the next nine months, 75 candidates attempted to qualify for public funding; 52 made the cut. Candidates attended forums and community events. They went door-knocking in their neighborhoods to raise money and votes. Mottet and her small staff verified donations submitted by candidates by hand, struggling to keep up.
Meanwhile, candidates got creative. On three separate occasions in the months leading up to the election, the ethical boundaries of the program were tested.
Thirteen City Council candidates, citing camaraderie as their inspiration and later as a defense against allegations of wrongdoing, agreed in writing to swap campaign contributions with one another to jack up their donor numbers in an attempt to unlock matching funds. Following WW’s exposure of the donation swaps, 12 of those candidates—including mayoral hopeful Liv Osthus—are now subjects of an investigation by the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office into whether they violated state elections law. That investigation remains ongoing.
Mottet was first alerted to the swap agreements Aug. 20 by a candidate named Melodie Bierwagen, who wrote in an email that “as a taxpayer, it didn’t feel right.” Mottet told Bierwagen to contact the secretary of state, writing that “Small Donor Elections rules [are] silent on the subject.” Mottet did not tell candidates to cease swapping. (Mottet says the program did not match donations between candidates that were swapped under a written agreement.)
Eleven days later, on the evening of Aug. 31 and into the early hours of Sept. 1, candidate Ben Hufford allegedly solicited campaign contributions from bargoers standing in line to get into Fortune, a downtown nightclub that he co-owns.
On those two dates, according to records provided by the city, Hufford received nearly 170 donations. (According to 11 patrons WW interviewed, Hufford told them they could either donate $10 to his campaign or pay the bar’s regular cover charge of $20. Others alleged he said they could only enter the bar if they contributed $10 to his campaign.)
WW exposed Hufford’s alleged gambit shortly after the election. In early November, Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade tossed out two complaints alleging Hufford broke elections law. Her office wrote that a news article on Hufford’s alleged actions did not constitute sufficient evidence of wrongdoing. (One of the two complainants, elections watchdog Seth Woolley, has since appealed that decision to Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt.)
A final example of candidates leveraging the matching system was legally above board, but stretched the definition of grassroots support.
Nonprofit canvassing group the Portland Clean Air Fund managed to buoy the otherwise nonexistent campaign of at least one City Council candidate, Chris Henry, a perennial contender for public office in Oregon who runs in part so the Green Party can maintain its eligibility to place candidates on the ballot. Henry says he agreed to pay PCAF $5,000 to collect 250 donations—$20 for every contribution collected. (Most were $5 donations.)
Henry unlocked $38,709 in matching funds from the city; 89% of Henry’s donations came from outside his district, which helps explain why he received more contributions than he did votes.
Eight other candidates—including Mayor-elect Keith Wilson—paid the nonprofit to collect donations.
Mottet says her program has no rules against a nonprofit collecting contributions for candidates.
“Rules were written with recognition that organizations play an important role in democracy,” Mottet wrote. “The program is aware that many local organizations are helping candidates who share their values raise money and get their message out to voters.”
The three examples of candidates exploiting loopholes in the program place it in a perilous position. Support for public financing is tenuous because taxpayer dollars are used to fund campaigns.
Former Commissioner Fritz, the architect of Small Donor Elections, says she’s “disappointed” candidates tried to “game” the system this election cycle.
“I used the program, and I was conscious that I was going for public funding,” Fritz says. “I knew I needed to raise it ethically and use it ethically.”
To be sure, Mottet and her small staff will likely never see such an unwieldy number of candidates participate in the program again; never again will 14 seats in city government be up for grabs in one election.
Mottet says the Portland Elections Commission evaluates the program’s performance after every election and makes recommendations about rule changes.
“The [commission] reviews both quantitative and qualitative data,” Mottet says, “to identify any emerging issues, the cause, and how to address them in a manner that is effective and does not have unintended consequences.”
Still, Fritz says she supports Portland’s program. And she thinks the outcomes could have been worse.
“I am grateful that most of the candidates who took liberties didn’t get elected,” she says. “What kind of councilor are you going to make if you’re seeking to get public money in ways that are not particularly honorable?”