PDX Government Reform

In November 2022, Portland Residents voted to reform the City Government with four major changes:

1. The Mayor is no longer a voting member of the city council, except as a tie-breaking vote.
2. City Councilors are no longer responsible bureaus. The City Manager and Mayor are now responsible for the Bureaus.
3. City Council now has 12 members. Each of the four districts will elect three councilors.
4. Ranked-choice voting is used for both the Mayor and Councilors.

The changes are in the process of being implemented, with first election under the new system scheduled for November 2024.

More information on the changes:

• OPB’s guide to the reforms
• Rose City Reform has a series of posts on the reforms
• The Notice of Measure Election for the reforms

Ranked-Choice Voting

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is an election process where voters write out their favorite candidate, their second-favorite candidate, their third-favorite candidate, and so on.

The city and local organizations have released a lot of great resources to learn more:

• The city’s Rank Choice Voting page is the best overall resource I’ve found.
  • It has a practice ballot that also walks through the tallying process that I found very helpful.
• Multnomah County created this short Youtube video as an explainer.
• North Star Civic has resources geared towards journalists covering the reforms.
• Rose City Reform’s substack has some good articles on the topic.
• The Wikipedia page on single transferrable vote is a good overview, that goes beyond the implementation in Portland by describing the history and implementations across the world. It also has a good visual of the tallying process