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In the first round of ballots counted on election night, Candace Avalos, Loretta Smith and Jamie Dunphy have taken an early lead for the three available seats in Portland City Council District 1 representing parts of the city east of Interstate 205.
The top three candidates are subject to change, however, due to ranked-choice voting. Only 23,189 ballots cast were included in Multnomah County’s Tuesday night vote count report, 22% of 101,214 of registered voters’ ballots in District 1. That means Avalos, Smith and Dunphy could very well be bumped off the podium in subsequent reports as additional votes are counted.
Avalos is a staunch progressive, while Smith is to her right, as is Dunphy, though not by much.
Avalos is the executive director of the climate nonprofit Verde and both served on the Charter Commission that created Portland’s new form of government and currently chairs one of the city’s police accountability bodies. She’s a vocal critic of the Portland Police Bureau and has long said City Hall needs more geographic and racial representation than it’s had in past years.
Smith was a member of the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners from 2011 to 2018. She made an unsuccessful bid for Portland City Council in 2020, losing to Jo Ann Hardesty.
Dunphy is the government relations director at the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network in Oregon and, over the past year, has been a fierce critic of Live Nation’s planned music venue in East Portland. He previously worked for City Commissioner Nick Fish.
Other candidates that received substantial votes in the first round include Noah Ernst, Steph Routh and Terrence Hayes. Routh is a longtime transportation advocate who sits on the Portland Planning Commission and is an adjunct professor of urban planning at Portland State University. She also runs a small consulting firm for community organizations and nonprofits.
Hayes, meanwhile, has become a darling of local moderates, including City Commissioner Rene Gonzalez and Multnomah County District Attorney-elect Nathan Vasquez. Hayes spent 13 years in prison after being convicted of attempted murder as a teenager and, after his release in 2016, took over a graffiti abatement business. Hayes, who is Black, was the first person in Oregon to get a felony record expunged in 2021 by Gov. Kate Brown under a new state law.
At the CORE food cart pod on Southeast 82nd Avenue tonight, the District 1 City Council candidates met for an inaugural election results party. “Democracy has finally arrived for our corner of the city—let’s party!” read the invitation from Steph Routh’s campaign to all 16 candidates plus any East Portland residents.
At 8 pm, the party got quiet as attendees and candidates hovered over their phones to decipher the Multnomah County elections website results. Avalos, Loretta Smith and Dunphy led the pack, in that order.
“It’s obviously very exciting and I think it’s a show of the community support and the kind of campaign we ran,” said Dunphy, who, along with a staff of seven paid canvassers, knocked on 13,000 doors in advance of the election. “There’s still a lot of votes to count, but it’s a wonderful place to be at this moment after a year of hard work.”
Upon seeing the results, Avalos, wearing a hot-pink suit with floral appliques, screamed and cried with joy in the arms of her mother.
“The way that this has given me hope for the future, hope for collaboration, hope for progressive policies to become a reality in Portland,” Avalos said in a speech, before leading a dance circle to “Diva” by Beyoncé. “I would be so blessed to be East Portland’s champion.”
Steph Routh, who did not place in the top three of the preliminary results, said: “I’m feeling, at the end of the day, we don’t know yet. I’m so delighted to be in this space with these candidates. This is a transformative moment for East Portland. We’re already winning.”
The report generated Tuesday night by the Multnomah County Elections Division is the only report that will be published tonight. On Wednesday evening by 6 pm, the county’s elections office will produce a second report that reflects additional votes cast, and the county will continue to produce a once-daily report as additional ballots are counted in the coming days.
Each daily report will tally all counted ballots and reassign votes until three candidates reach the 25%-plus-1 vote threshold needed to get elected. That means tonight’s report—and the three candidates that reached the 25%-plus-1 threshold—could shift in the coming days.
The once-daily report applies to all four City Council races and the mayor’s race, since all five races use ranked-choice voting.
By Thursday evening, it’s likely that more than 80% of the ballots cast will have been counted and tabulated, giving a more secure sense of who the top three candidates in each district will be.