In a New Kind of Election, Voter Turnout Still Lagged in East Portland

One in 6 voters who cast a ballot did not mark a candidate for City Council, the county data shows.

Waiting for a bus along Southeast 82nd Avenue. (Wesley Lapointe)
By Sophie Peel

Multnomah County released a report on Monday about the city of Portland’s first election to use ranked-choice voting to select 12 City Council members and a new mayor.

The county’s Elections Division reported that 71% of Portland voters returned a ranked-choice ballot, compared to 75% of Portlanders who returned the standard ballot. (The ranked-choice contests were printed on a separate slip of a paper than the regular contests, but both ballots were mailed together.)

Voters in District 1, which covers East Portland, were less likely to return ballots than in the other three voting districts. Fifty-five percent of District 1 voters cast a ballot, compared to between 71% and 76% turnout in the other three districts.

Those numbers are especially noteworthy because the new form of government is intended to give a greater voice to East Portland.

Undervoting, in which a voter doesn’t mark any candidate for the City Council, was more common in District 1 than in the other three districts: 20.8% of District 1 voters chose no candidate for City Council, compared to 11.8% in District 2, 13.1% in District 3, and 15.7% in District 4. That averages out to 15% of voters marking no candidates on their City Council ballots, or 1 in 6 voters that cast a ballot.

Overall voter turnout also lagged in District 1, as has historically been the case. The city of Portland this year spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on educating voters about ranked-choice voting in preparation for November’s election. The city concentrated most of those efforts in District 1 due to historically low voter turnout in East Portland.

(This shows a similar trend to what The Oregonian previously reported about voter participation across the four districts and, in particular, undervoting in District 1.)

Six percent of voters that did turn in a ballot across the city did not rank anyone for mayor, the county data shows. (In that contest, political outsider and business owner Keith Wilson won in a landslide.)

As for overvotes, 2,582 voters—less than 1% who filled out a ranked-choice ballot—accidentally marked two first-place choices for City Council. Between 1,000 and 2,000 voters accidentally marked more than one candidate in each of the second-, third-, fourth, fifth- and sixth-place ranks.

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