Updates on the Ranked Choice Voting Results
In a previous post we dove into the initial election results from Portland’s Ranked Choice Voting elections. Each night the Multnomah County Elections office is updating their RCV election results page dand we will update visualizations here.
Things to Keep an Eye Out For
We don’t know how the remaining 130,000 ballots (as of 7:00am on November 7) will change results. They are being processed in the order they were received, and so we are unsure if there is a geographic or any other pattern. But here are the things we are looking out for:
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Making Sense of the 2024 City of Portland Elections
Updates on results will be posted here nightly!
Tonight Portland voters will learn a lot about the new voting system adopted as a part of charter reform. The Mayor, Auditor, and Council will all be selected with ranked preferences form voters. The Council is the unique story here as three winners will be selected from these rankings in each of the four new districts.
We are sharing some initial analyses here to explore the patterns from these elections. But first an important note: These are just preliminary results. The Multnomah County Elections Division is releasing full tabulations each evening. For the next few days ballots will continue to be returned to the County, resulting in updates that may change these results. This is a disclaimer one should remember when also reviewing national returns in general! With that note, lets see what the voters have shared so far.
An Update: Tracking Ranked Choice Voting Results in the City of Portland
Later tonight, the Multnomah County Elections Division will release new results for the City of Portland races here in Oregon. I will post our first visualizations here on our Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) website blog.
We noticed last night that the percentage of ballots processed in time for the first preliminary results were lower than we felt comfortable presenting. Initially looking at those data though, we found some promising patterns in terms of how voters were managing choices. District 1 results in particular seem to be made up of a lot of ballots that have not been processed yet. Preliminary results last night showed about 50% less total ballots in District 1 compared to the other districts. That gave us reason to pause on data analysis.
Below are the results for the Mayor’s race – which has more votes as a citywide race. Here we see the outsider Keith Wilson besting three sitting city commissioners.
We will publish an update tonight around 6:30pm Pacific, so be on the lookout! In the interim, if you did not yet read our primer on the topic, take a look prior to this evening.
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EVIC Director Paul Gronke appears on Election Day edition of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal
In case you were not online at 5am Pacific on Election Day (but if you are reading this post, you are an “Election Geek” and thus, you were likely already awake and working!), Paul Gronke, PhD, Director of the Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) and Professor of Political Science at Reed College was live on C-SPAN for an hour discussing “all things elections” with C-SPAN Washington Journal Host Mimi Geerges.
Merry-go-Round: Tracking Ranked Choice Voting Results
On Tuesday, November 5, 2024, Portland, Oregon will find out how the first tabulations of City Council, Mayoral, and Auditor votes work under our new ranked choice and multi-winner voting systems. For City Council elections, three winners will be selected from four brand new districts (the Mayor and City Auditor are elected under single winner RCV).
This new multi-seat method has some very interesting math and campaign implications. Votes can be transferred both from eliminated candidates and from winning candidates who exceed the number needed to win. This post helps our readers navigate this upcoming process.
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Explainer & Lessons Learned From the Ballot Drop Box Fires in Multnomah County, Oregon and Clark County, Washington
Paul Gronke (Reed College) and Paul Manson (Center for Public Service at Portland State University), for the Elections & Voting Information Center in Portland, Oregon*
Current version: November 1, 2024
As many news outlets have reported, on Monday, October 28, 2024, drop boxes in Multnomah County, Oregon and Clark County, Washington were set on fire by someone who attached an incendiary device designed to breach metal and create intense heat. Election officials and law enforcement in both counties have been quick to respond.
This essay is the Elections & Voting Information Center’s (EVIC) contribution to helping citizens understand what happened—to the best of our knowledge—and conveying information about these events to a national audience that is suddenly focused on election administration in our region.
What happened?
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New Research from USC Center for Inclusive Democracy and EVIC Collaboration on Ballot Tracking
We’re excited to share some new research from the Center for Inclusive Democracy (CID) at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and our team here at the Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC).
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The Impact of Public Records Requests on Local Election Officials: Findings from the 2023 EVIC LEO Survey
By Paul Gronke and Paul Manson
Kyle Yoder and April Tan of the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) released a focus brief on the use and abuse of public records requests, how these requests have impacted local elections offices, and what legislative solutions have been shown to ease the burden placed on local election officials (LEOs).
The research team at the Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) has been tracking public records requests in our 2023 EVIC LEO Survey, part of a broader investigation into workloads, staffing, and administrative burdens. The survey provides additional evidence about the dramatic increase in workload resulting from public records requests, particularly in medium-sized and larger jurisdictions where these requests seem to be concentrated.
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