When developers announced plans for a new 38-bay diesel truck transfer station on the grounds of a long-abandoned K-Mart department store, East Portland, Oregon, residents who’d hoped it might become a grocery store instead quickly collected more than 6,600 signatures in opposition and worked to stop it. The 260,000-square-foot warehouse sat just a javelin’s toss away from the fields where the Parkrose High Broncos practiced football, baseball, and soccer. Dozens of kids walked to Parkrose high and middle schools each day along NE 122nd Avenue and Sandy Boulevard. Parents filled city meetings, worried about their kids breathing in diesel fumes while running cross-country or dodging 18-wheelers as they hustled toward class each morning. Students studied environmental justice and submitted alternate environmental plans for the site, along with photos from their bedroom windows that overlooked the lot where trucks would spew exhaust, sometimes as close as 15 feet away.
No one listened. City leaders felt no need. Portland’s four-member city council lived far from these neighborhoods, sometimes derided by locals as the faraway “numbers.” Wealthier areas, the business community, the city’s trendy downtown – those interests were always heard. But East Portland? It had no one on the city council. Not now, and only twice in the council’s history has a member lived anywhere to the east of Interstate 205.
The city could treat it as a literal dumping ground, with very real consequences — the highest rates of juvenile asthma in the city, the lowest household income, the fewest sidewalks and paved streets, even life expectancy rates more than a decade shorter than elsewhere in Portland. The weather neighborhoods had safer walks to schools, and zoning decisions protected residents not trucks. They also had better representation.
“We testified at city hall. We tried so hard to push our representatives, and this is the problem,” says Lily Burnett, who lives in the district and whose child will attend these schools. “They don't have anything to gain by showing up for East Portland. They don't think we're going to show up in big enough numbers to vote for them or vote them out.”
That’s about to change.
Portland revised its city charter two years ago. This week, East Portlanders' is one of the city’s four council districts that will elect three members to the new 12-person governing body. The election will be held using a proportional form of ranked choice voting that will ensure that all voices in this most diverse district – with the highest percentages of voters of color, Indigenous voters, independent voters and Republicans – all have a real opportunity to be heard. The three representatives will immediately become the largest number of councilors this neighborhood has ever had.
“Now is our time,” says Steph Routh, a Parkrose native and one of the leading candidates for a council seat.
It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon and the District 1 candidates have gathered for a meet-and-greet pizza party with voters in Luuwit View Park. There’s genuine collegiality amongst the half-dozen candidates, several of whom have been informally running together and lifting each other up, thanks to the new ranked choice system. Candidates are encouraging voters to rank them first, and their similarly-minded competitors second and third.
Fairer rules and fairer representation has changed plenty already. Candidates have been able to laser-focus on their own neighborhoods rather than doorknock across the entire city. And with proportional RCV, there’s a chance for everyone to elect someone to one of their three local seats who represents their views.
“For working people and communities of color, there was a huge disconnect between who got elected and who voters felt could actually represent them,” says Candace Avalos, an environmental justice activist also seeking a District 1 seat. “Having three seats in each district expands choices for voters.”
“We’re going to have a seat at the table,” adds Routh, a favorite to even become the next council president, a stunning leap for these perpetually underrepresented neighborhoods. “Our lack of political power is evident in the lack of infrastructure, the way that this part of the city has just been left behind. I'm hoping that what we're going to see is people being motivated to participate in our democracy again.”
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East Portland is hardly the only neighborhood here with challenges. This liberal bastion, with a much-heralded music scene, some of the nation’s most celebrated restaurants, even an acclaimed comedy show poking fun at the hipster excess of “Portlandia,” has endured a difficult COVID and post-pandemic period, which included days of riots and protests (and a violent police response) after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. The new Ritz-Carlton just celebrated its first anniversary, its opulence contrasted against streets filled with homeless people. Walk across the city’s famed bridges and waterfront parks and its fentanyl and drug addiction crises are on full display.
It’s no different a short walk away in Old Town Portland, where on a recent Saturday morning residents gathered over coffee and bagels to learn more about how to vote with the charter reforms and electoral changes that residents enacted in hopes of both expanding representation and making this city’s problems solvable again.
“The city has become a hellhole because of bad leadership,” says Darlene Garrett, the executive director of the District 4 Coalition, which represents 32 neighborhood associations in the city’s both thriving and troubled northwest and southwest. “But this election,” she says, “could be our saving grace.”
The changes adopted by voters are comprehensive and potentially transformative. Ranked choice voting is at the heart of them. For the first time, Portland will choose its mayor with RCV, ensuring that voters get to consider everyone in a crowded field and that the winner has a majority and a mandate to lead. The city council, meanwhile, will be expanded from a tiny four to a more modern 12, and elected from four geographic districts rather than city-wide.
It’s a fascinating experiment: Single-member ranked choice for mayor, which gives voters the opportunity to rank their top candidates in order, first, second, third, and so on. If no one wins a majority straightaway, an instant runoff will occur. The bottom candidates will be eliminated, and those supporters will have their second choices counted.
But for council, Portland will use a multi-winner, proportional form of RCV that seeks to build consensus in another way – by ensuring a full range of perspectives and communities – whether renters, parents, voters of color, or the business community – have a seat at the table. In this system, 25 percent plus one vote will be enough to elect each member – which means that in this three-member district, at least 75 percent of voters will elect a candidate they support. That’s a huge change in an area used to no representation at all.
This feels especially important in a city grappling for the best way forward on complicated issues such as policing, homelessness, drug addiction, development, and transportation, among others. Solutions going forward will be crafted with a wider range of voices; the council will need to hear each other out and find inclusive, common ground.
“You're going to have a government, I suspect, that is going to have a little bit of something for everyone,” says Robin Ye, who co-chaired the city council charter revision committee. “You're going to have big business people on the council, and you're also going to have out socialists. You are going to have renters. You're going to have people who are under 30. You're going to have people who've been in politics for 40 years. That's government. That forces dialogue. That’s how it should be.”
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While Portland voters prepare for big changes in city government, the entire state could experience reform soon. Oregon is one of four states that will consider enacting some form of statewide ranked choice voting this fall, potentially tripling the number of states that offer this extra choice to voters. So while Portland voters use RCV for the first time, they will also be voting alongside the rest of the state on whether to expand it to nearly every election.
Dan Rayfield, the former state house speaker now running for attorney general, drove the legislative effort to put the statewide RCV initiative on the ballot. During his state house years, Rayfield told me, he saw “a blaring, constant reminder of the inefficiency of our system” and realized RCV would fix it by changing the incentives for politicians. Sometimes that manifested itself electorally, when members celebrated their opponent drawing a third-party challenge that might divide the other side. Other times it involved independent voters who had no say in elections at all, with most members elected from noncompetitive elections decided in primaries. And sometimes he watched the inability of lawmakers to form bipartisan coalitions, even when they agreed on the merits of a program and the potential solution.
“You need to have people elected by a majority of voters,” Rayfield says, “and you need to incentivize alternative voices in the system. I think that’s incredibly important. We need to get rid of the divisiveness. Ranked choice voting is not a silver bullet, but it’s a very important element of that.”
Rayfield often won his re-election races with as much as 70 percent of the vote, but knows that’s a mirage. “I’d love to believe that 72 percent of the people who vote for me every cycle really love me,” he says. “But I’m sure that there are probably some other voices that they would have loved to have been able to consider, and they didn’t get that opportunity.”
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That very normalization has been top priority for Portland and Multnomah County officials, and has birthed some of the most creative election education anywhere in the nation. “It’s a lot of reform happening at once,” as Rayfield notes.
Much of the coordination has fallen to Leah Benson, the RCV project manager for the county elections office. On a recent Friday afternoon, Benson welcomed me to her office and walked me through what has been a multi-level education plan to try and ensure that every voter understands and feels comfortable with the new ballot they’re seeing this fall.
The city and county, alongside trusted nonprofits and community voices, have been everywhere: They’ve been at NBA games to teach thousands of Portland Trail Blazers fans.
“Who doesn’t have their five favorite Trail Blazers to rank?” Benson asks.
Simulated RCV ballots have been online on city and county websites so voters can practice and become familiar with the process. The pizza toppings at mayoral forums have been chosen with RCV, as has the gourmet ice cream at other forums provided by the local favorite Jeni’s. Educators have worked to reach people where they are, for example, working with a queer artist collective to combine free headshots for artists with a class on RCV and a performance.
“We’re providing guidance on how to fill out a ballot, and making sure the instructions are clear,” Benson says. “The city’s helping to build awareness and make sure people know it’s coming.”
The charter amendments required officials to embark on a comprehensive education program that could well become a national model. “The guiding light of the outreach is making sure that we’re reaching people who do not live in the economic center, who are socioeconomically disadvantaged,” says Benson, “folks who are housing insecure or people who do not speak English at home. It’s been so creative – and targeted based on peoples’ needs.”
The next night, those outreach efforts had a very different soundtrack – “This Is Halloween” by Marilyn Manson. As Portland teens, families and young couples out at the ScareGrounds at Oaks Park on a Saturday night stood in line for three terrifying haunted houses — the medieval-themed Forbidden Fortress, a Silver Scream where cinematic horror-film killers were unleashed once more, and a modern-day monster hunt in Slayers — RCV activists were there trying to ensure there wouldn’t be anything scary about the new voting procedure.
At the I Heart Radio table (next to the temporary tattoo station), those who survived the cursed castles and Hollywood’s most infamous serial killers could scan a QR code and immediately take part in a RCV poll to rank the three haunted houses. A group of seven University of Oregon students gathered with their phones and debated the biggest scares. Every ballot naturally looked a little different, but as they debated amongst themselves, Silver Scream became the consensus pick. “I’d never used this before,” said Diane Levine, “but it’s easy and fun.” Scary? She laughs. “Not scary at all.”
* * *
Back at the East Portland pizza party in Luuwit Park, Candace Avalos — an environmental justice activist who describes herself as a first-generation Blacktina as a daughter of Black Americans and Guatemalan immigrants – is rattling off disturbing statistics about the district. The district is home to half of Portland’s children. The average household income is $30,000 less than the rest of the city. The district includes 28 of the 30 high-crash corridors in Portland, where traffic accidents and deaths are the highest. Gun violence is high, police reaction time slow.
“We’re dying with gun violence, we're dying on the streets, we’re dying with polluted air,” Avalos tells me. “All those add to our decreased life expectancy. Ten years compared to the other districts. Streets, lighting, public transportation, parks. These real-life outcomes are happening with a lack of investment. That’s the price we pay for our lack of representation.”
Avalos has made a point of trying to tour each of the city’s 200 parks as she campaigns. It’s yet another story of inequity. The nicest, most renovated parks, with the fanciest playgrounds and the coolest splash pads, can be found in the other districts. She tells me to visit West Powell Hurst Park, which turns out to be about four miles away down 122nd Avenue. Avalos described it as “blank” to me. “It doesn’t really have anything. Nothing.”
And she’s right, there’s no real playground, certainly no splash pad. The grass has not been maintained. A dirt track runs around the perimeter that is clearly popular with dog owners. Yet it is somehow worse than she described. There’s broken glass everywhere. The road leading to the park is potholed and in disrepair.
“This is what’s going to change,” she says. “We know that giving people more choices gives them more voices.”
Those voices won’t necessarily sing in harmony. Avalos has encouraged a different approach to policing that involves sending the right kind of provider to each incident. Another Black candidate who could win alongside her, Terence Hayes, owns a graffiti removal company and has backed more police officers to take on questions of homelessness, drug use and public camping. Both of them could win seats – which means both perspectives on crucial public issues would have a seat at a table, would hear each other out, and find a path forward, together.
“Now, it doesn’t matter whether you’re part of the minority or part of the majority,” Avalos says. “All of us, everyone, is going to get more representation.
“We’ll have three,” she says, excitedly. “We'll have more representation on day one than we've had in a hundred years. Which is crazy.”
