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The composition of the 12-member Portland City Council is closer to being settled after the Multnomah County Elections Division released additional results on Wednesday evening.
Nearly 200,000 ballots have now been counted in the county’s latest citywide report. That’s out of 466,000 total eligible voters in the city of Portland, or about 42%. Voter turnout is expected to peak around 75%.
In District 1, which covers Portland east of Interstate 205, Candace Avalos, Loretta Smith and Jamie Dunphy appear headed for victory. Those are the same three front-runners from preliminary results on election night. (The number of ballots returned and counted from District 1 is lagging behind the other three districts by 20,000 fewer votes.)
In District 2, spanning North and most of Northeast Portland, Dan Ryan, Elana Pirtle-Guiney and Sameer Kanal are nearing victory. The three leaders remain unchanged from preliminary election night results.
In District 3, which covers Southeast Portland west of I-205, Steve Novick, Angelita Morillo and Tiffany Koyama Lane are well positioned to win the three seats. The next closest candidate to those three in the first round of counting is Kezia Wanner, but she had 6,600 fewer votes than Morillo—a margin that will be difficult to close.
And in District 4, which covers all of Portland west of the Willamette River and a sliver of Southeast Portland, Olivia Clark, Mitch Green and Eric Zimmerman remain the top three candidates. However, results show that before any votes were reallocated in the ranked-choice system, bike cop Eli Arnold lagged behind Zimmerman by just 50 votes—suggesting that the third seat is still up for grabs between the two centrist candidates.
On election night, preliminary results factored in just a third of total registered voters’ ballots, leaving the early leaders subject to getting bumped off the podium. Though tonight’s results inch closer to clarity, the county reports that 345,803 ballots cast in Portland have been returned so far. That means another 145,000 ballots have yet to be counted in the City Council races.
If the 12 front-runners remain stable throughout the week, that means the new City Council will represent a diverse set of councilors that span the spectrum in age, race, experience and political ideology.
Staunch progressives among the front-runners include Avalos in District 1, Green in District 4, Kanal in District 2, and Koyama Lane and Morillo in District 3.
Front-runners that have staked out a more moderate ground include Smith in District 1, Ryan in District 2, and Zimmerman and Clark in District 4. (Ryan is a current Portland city commissioner, and Smith served on the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners from 2011 to 2018.)
Candidates somewhere between the two groups—potential swing votes, in other words—include Dunphy, a legislative director for the American Cancer Society, in District 1; Pirtle-Guiney, a former staffer to Gov. Kate Brown and a former labor union leader, in District 2; and Novick in District 3.