Fair warning—this is our nerdiest podcast episode yet.
On the other hand, if you’re curious about how Portland’s new voting system is shifting political dynamics, this episode is for you.
Moon Duchin is a mathematician who leads the Data and Democracy Lab at Cornell University. George Cheung is the founding director of More Equitable Democracy, a Seattle-based group focused on racial justice through electoral reform.
Neither of them lives in Portland—yet both can discuss the 2024 city election in more detail than most locals. The reason? Portland is now the only major U.S. city using proportional representation—making it a rare case study for those examining how the system works in practice.
For more context, read Rose City Reform’s story about Portland in the National Civic Review
“The city took it seriously”
Cheung, who holds a master’s in public policy from Harvard, jokes that if American democracy had an operating system, we’d still be running the starter version.
He notes that the United States inherited its first-past-the-post elections from England. While most democracies have since shifted to proportional systems, the U.S. and the U.K. have largely stuck with winner-take-all rules.
“We’ve never had a [national] conversation about whether we should keep this colonial vestige, or choose something that lets any group over a certain percentage get meaningful representation,” Cheung says.
By contrast, that topic was at the heart of Portland’s charter review.
“What was exciting about Portland’s process was the city’s willingness to commit serious resources and engage people broadly,” says Cheung, who describes the city’s outreach and extended public deliberation as a kind of “secret sauce” he believes other cities should emulate.
“The city took it seriously,” he says.
“A really good modeling problem”
For Duchin’s team of data scientists, Portland is part of an ongoing effort to model and measure how voters behave under alternative voting systems.
While the Charter Commission was still weighing options, her lab partnered with More Equitable Democracy to predict how Portland voters might make decisions in ranked-choice elections—a type of analysis the group has done in more than 30 places nationwide.
“We have a lot of evidence of how people vote when they can choose one,” Duchin says. “We have very little recent evidence of how Americans vote when they can choose several.”
“I like geometry. I like probability. This to me was a really good modeling problem of trying to figure out, can we build an engine that guesses how people will rank?” she asks.
The lab tested different scenarios—whether voters would prioritize race, ideology, geography, or something else—and ran simulations on how different district models might play out.
“What we found here—and in most, though not all, of the places we've looked at—is that Single Transferable Vote (STV), the system Portland settled on, does a great job at achieving proportionality under a huge range of conditions,” Duchin says.
“STV prioritizes having more groups at the table”
After the election, her team turned to the real election results.
Duchin’s lab used statistical methods typically applied in Voting Rights Act cases to assess whether Portlanders of color were able to elect their preferred candidates. It’s the first time those techniques have been applied to a real-world ranked-choice election, she says.
According to the analysis, all five councilors who identify as people of color—Candace Avalos (D1), Loretta Smith (D1), Sameer Kanal (D2), Tiffany Koyama Lane (D3), and Angelita Morillo (D3)—were candidates of choice for non-white voters. In District 4, where all winners were white, Mitch Green was preferred by voters of color.
Green’s election, Duchin says, also shows how STV can produce a distinct set of winners. Models run by her team indicate that Green—a democratic socialist—would likely have lost under more common methods, even in a three-seat race. Most methods instead favored runner-up Eli Arnold, a mainstream progressive aligned with the district’s other winners, Olivia Clark and Eric Zimmerman.
“Compared to the other popular systems, STV does not let a small but coherent block of voters control and sweep the whole outcome,” Duchin says. “STV prioritizes having more groups at the table.”
“There is no perfect political system”
For Cheung, that’s the beauty of Portland’s new system. He points to Ireland, where Single Transferable Vote is used nationwide and proportionality extends beyond elections.
“If your party wins 30% of the vote, you will win roughly 30% of seats. If you win 30% of seats, you get to pick 30% of committee chairs in the legislative body. That goes to the question of ‘how do we live together’ and ‘how do we share power,’” he says.
Duchin is quick to add that no political system is perfect.
“It’s not all rosy with STV,” she says, noting that multi-seat districts, which tend to be larger than those with a single representative, may offer less assurance that representation will be distributed across neighborhoods. In District 4, for example, all councilors live in Southwest Portland, and none live in the part of the district that extends across the river.
“No system is going to come along and solve all the challenges of making group decisions,” Duchin observes.
“But this is sincerely true: for the last few months, to anyone who's asked me for good news in democracy, I say: take a look at Portland, Oregon.”
📚 Read or Listen
Podcasts, thinkers, and books mentioned in this episode:
More Perfect — Podcast on the U.S. Supreme Court and constitutional issues
The Future of Our Former Democracy — Podcast by More Equitable Democracy
The Concept of Representation — Book by Hannah Pitkin
Lani Guinier — Writings on voting rights, electoral systems, and civil rights
Spencer Overton — Scholarship on democracy, race, and emerging technologies
Guy-Uriel Charles — Legal scholar on voting rights and democracy reform
Elizabeth Anderson — Political theorist focused on democratic equality
Claudine Gay — Research on race and political representation
Stump Talk is edited and produced by Jon Garcia of Lake Productions.
