Charter School: Follow that vote!

Rose City Reform digs into the portion of single transferable vote that's most puzzling to voters: Vote transfers.

Maja Viklands Harris

Sep 27, 2022

Portlanders are getting ready to make a big decision.

And as voters ponder the Charter Commission’s ballot measure, many are asking: Exactly how would my vote be transferred?

This edition of Charter School is for you.

Who would have thought?

Apparently Rose City Reform isn’t geeky enough.

After my primer on single transferable vote (STV) – which to my astonishment became Rose City Reform’s most popular post ever – many readers contacted me to say: “Excuse me, but you left out the most important part. I want to know exactly how my vote will be transferred!”

Well, since you insist!

Let’s have a look at STV vote transfers.

Read my primer on single transferable vote.

When and how does your vote transfer?

Let’s recap the basics of STV, which is the voting method proposed for Portland City Council elections.

STV is a multi-winner form of ranked choice voting. It’s designed to allocate multiple seats in proportion to their respective share of the overall vote.

To win a seat, candidates have to clear a certain threshold, and that threshold depends on the number of seats to be filled. In a three-seat election, which would be the case in Portland’s proposed districts, the threshold would be 25%+1 of the vote.

So how can your vote move within the STV system?

There are two ways:

Scenario 1: Your first choice has been eliminated. Then the voting machine is going to move your entire vote to the next choice on your ballot.

Scenario 2: Your first choice has won a seat with more votes than they needed to get elected. Then the voting machine is going to splice off a portion of your vote and allocate it to the next choice on your ballot.

Today, we’ll break down how that happens.

Keep in mind, we’re speculating here.

There’s a reason I was vague about Portland’s proposed system.

We don’t actually know the specifics of how vote transfers would work in Portland. Single transferable vote can vary between jurisdictions, and when new voting methods get adopted, the real nitty-gritty gets worked out after adoption.

In Portland’s case, the Multnomah County Elections Office and the City of Portland would need to work together to iron out the final details, and City Council would ultimately need to sign off on the plan.

But we have a pretty good idea of the Charter Commission’s intent. And that’s because the commission’s proposed new charter has a section that, although fairly broad, tries to capture to how the voting method would work in practice.

So let’s take some liberties and make a prediction about how vote transfers might happen in Portland, based on the information we have at hand. And who better to do that than someone who has worked with three cities that have recently adopted STV for city elections?

Rose City Reform turned to Maria Perez, co-director of Democracy Rising, a nationwide organization that helps jurisdictions implement ranked choice voting.

Look to Albany and Palm Desert for cues, Perez says.

Perez’s guess, which is more educated than most, is that Portland would use the same system as Eastpointe, MI, and Albany and Palm Desert in California.

Democracy Rising worked with Eastpointe to implement its first STV election in 2019, and is currently working with Albany and Palm Desert to prepare for their first STV elections in November.

So how do vote transfers work in those cities?

If your top candidate is eliminated, your whole vote transfers to your next candidate of choice. But if your top candidate is elected with more votes than they need, then everyone who listed that candidate as their first choice gets a little slice of their vote moved to the next choice on their ballot.

“One of the interesting things about multi-winner ranked choice voting is this idea of surplus votes,” Perez says.

The surplus is the amount of extra votes that a candidate gets on top of what’s needed to get elected. And the size of the surplus directly corresponds to the portion of your vote that will be moved to your next choice, if your first choice wins with more votes than necessary.

Pro tip: Think of your vote as a dollar.

Perez says the easiest way to understand the surplus is to think of your vote as a dollar.

“Imagine forty people are pooling money together for a pizza,” she says.

Each person puts in $1. But the pizza only costs $20, so there’s $20 left over.

“What's going to happen with that leftover money? Every single person should get some change, right? That’s what happens with STV. And you get to put that change toward your next choice,” says Perez, before she offers another example:

Imagine a race where the threshold is a hundred votes, but one candidate gets 110 votes. One hundred gets her elected. The remaining ten make up the surplus. In this scenario, the candidate has 10% more votes than she needs.

The voting machine will now take 10%, the surplus percentage, from the vote of every voter who chose that candidate as their first choice, and apply it to the next choice on each voter's ballot.

Watch Democracy Rising’s educational video about STV.

Thankfully, the voting machine does the math.

Of course, in real-life elections, numbers are more complex.

Votes may be transferred as fractions, or percentages with multiple decimal points. How many decimal points, and whether you round percentages up or down, are some of those intricate details that get worked out after adoption.

In the old days, election workers counted STV ballots by hand. These days, sophisticated machines do the work.

If you don’t understand all of the inner workings of STV, don’t sweat it, Perez says.

"Voters need to know that there's an election coming up, what the ballot is going to look like, and how you fill it out. More engaged voters might want to dive deeper into the math of it, and they certainly can, but most voters will just want to make sure their vote matters and counts."