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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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.
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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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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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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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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Clip from a game show never to be aired:
Announcer: “26,824. Is that your final answer, Professor Gronke?”
Gronke: “Let me use my lifeline.”
Clock ticks …
Gronke: “16840.43. That’s my final answer!”
Announcer: “Your final answer to the question `How many election workers
there are in the United States is 16840 point 43??”
Gronke: “Ok, around 20,000. I am very confident that there are around 20,000
election workers in the United States. Or maybe a few thousand more …”
Announcer: On to our next contestant!
The scenario above may never appear on television, but the question is a real one, and one that evades a good answer because there is so little systematic information about the size and composition of the elections workforce.
This post and future posts will provide information about the elections workforce, drawing on results from the 2023 Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) Local Election Official (LEO) Survey. We hope this will contribute to efforts to improve the size, diversity, and professionalization in that workforce, and spur other efforts to improve our knowledge base about staff to monitor progress moving forward.
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In case you missed our October 8, 2024 webinar “The Impact of EVIC’s Local Election Official Survey Program on Election Science Research and Election Administration” – or want to re-watch this fantastic discussion – the conversation between EVIC’s Founder and Director and Reed College Political Scientist Paul Gronke, PhD, and 2024-2026 Andrew Carnegie Fellows and Election Science researchers Lisa A. Bryant, PhD (California State University, Fresno), and Mara Suttmann-Lea, PhD, Connecticut College), is posted to our new EVIC YouTube channel at this link.