Tim Scott: "This is not the hardest problem we'll solve in our careers."
Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott on changing Portland’s voting method.
Do you live in Portland or Multnomah County? Then your ballot will get a serious makeover over the next four years.
Voters in both jurisdictions have okayed a switch to ranked choice voting, starting in 2024 and 2026, respectively.
Rose City Reform had a chance to catch up with Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott to learn how the implementation process is going.
Next November, Portlanders will experience a city election like no other.
First, all city government seats will be up for grabs. Secondly, Rose City voters will have the option to rank candidates for all city offices. Third, the 2024 election is when Portland’s four new multi-member districts go live.
Each city council district will elect three representatives via a version of ranked choice voting called single transferable vote. That’s still a relatively rare voting method in the United States. Portland will be the first major city to use it since New York City in 1947.
Sound like a big lift? You bet. The City of Portland has an entire transition team dedicated to navigating the coming changes. But there’s one giant puzzle piece of charter reform that falls largely outside the city's purview:
The 2024 election itself.
That job falls to the unsung heroes at the Multnomah County Election Division, under Tim Scott’s leadership. Scott, a seasoned election administrator who also serves as president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks, has already led a number of implementation processes for the county, including Oregon’s first-in-the-nation automatic voter registration.
On November 5, 2024, his team will be running the show. And when that election is on the books, it will be time to start working on round two of voting reform. Multnomah County’s first ranked-choice election is slated for 2026.
All things considered, I felt pretty fortunate to get on Tim Scott’s schedule.
Here’s what he had to say.
Portland’s new electoral system is rare in the United States. What can you say to Portlanders who are concerned about its novelty?
I keep telling people this is not the hardest problem we’ll solve in our careers. For us election administrators, it will take a significant amount of work. But we have the right people at the table, and we’re confident in our vendors, whether they be tally system vendors, envelope vendors, or ballot vendors.
This seems like a really big change. But we’re not the first jurisdiction to do this. We’re not starting from scratch. We have an excellent voter education and outreach team both at Multnomah County and at the City of Portland.
I want people to understand that we’ll be able to do this, even though it’s new.
Why does Multnomah County handle Portland’s elections?
By Oregon statute, we’re the entity that’s required to conduct elections. There’s no authority for cities or other governmental subdivisions to conduct elections in Oregon.
That also means that some things that might seem like policy decisions for the City of Portland are already prescribed in statute, or they may be driven by limitations in our tally system software or physical limitations like the size of the ballot that our system can accommodate.
That’s what we’re working through with city staff right now.
Can you give us an example of what you’re talking about?
Write-ins are a big topic of debate right now. Oregon’s statutes are pretty prescriptive: Write-ins are allowed, and the rule is one write-in per office.
In the case of Portland’s city council elections, three positions are being elected, so there will be three write-in lines. That all sounds pretty clear, right? However, there’s no guidance in state statute, county rules, or city rules as to how write-ins are dealt with in situations specific to ranked choice voting, particularly in round-by-round eliminations.
Those types of complex and nuanced discussions are happening right now.
You mentioned that there are software and physical limitations to consider. What are some of those limitations?
The good news is that our tally system vendor, Clear Ballot, can accommodate many different options. But physical limitations, like the actual ballot page, could impact the number of rankings we can allow.
Some members of the Charter Commission made it clear that they wanted voters to be able to rank all candidates. That’s not a realistic scenario, given the number of candidates that file for offices like Portland Mayor. I’ve seen that number as high as 24.
A grid-style ballot with 24 candidates and 24 rankings just isn’t physically possible, unless we want to hand count ballots, which I don’t think anyone wants us to do with 450,000 registered voters in the City of Portland.
There’s also good research available about how voters interact with ranked choice voting, and it shows that people experience fatigue after a certain number of rankings.
What kind of research are you leaning on in your decisions?
We’re not the first to do ranked choice voting. There are case studies in jurisdictions around the country to guide us toward a solution that aligns with best practices and the physical constraints of the system.
With regards to Portland’s adoption of single transferable vote, which is not as commonly used, a few jurisdictions have recently implemented that voting method, and we are studying them as well.
When do you think you’ll be ready to sign off on the software for Portland’s elections?
There’s no specific deadline, but our tally systems vendor, Clear Ballot, has indicated that their goal is to be done with federal certification of our software system early next year, so we have time to do state certification and local testing before the 2024 election.
Have you begun working on Multnomah County’s transition to ranked choice voting yet?
We plan to stagger the implementations so we have time to learn from our implementation with the City of Portland. I hope we think of everything, but this is a new process for us, and I’m sure there will be some opportunities for refinement with Multnomah County’s implementation in 2026.
Ultimately, we want to align the systems as much as possible. It’s in the voters’ best interest to have something similar between the two jurisdictions so that voters are not confused about how to vote.
Finally, if this isn’t the hardest thing the Multnomah County Elections Division will tackle in the foreseeable future – what is? What are some tougher challenges that election administrators face?
Election administrators are very skilled at solving difficult problems related to the logistics of conducting elections or educating voters about how to interact with election systems.
However, one of the most difficult problems we are facing right now is the persistent problem of misinformation about election administration. This erodes the public’s confidence in those systems and leads to many people reaching out with questions based on misinformation that they saw on social media or cable news.
We’ve seen an unprecedented increase in public records requests based solely on disproven conspiracy theories. Election administrators around the country are working to figure out how to react to or solve this problem so they can keep their focus on conducting accessible, secure, and transparent elections.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
DISCLOSURE: In 2022, I served on the Multnomah County Charter Review Committee that referred the ranked choice voting ballot measure to Multnomah County voters in 2022. The measure passed with 69%.
Keep reading, Richard. The disclosure is at the end of the post. Portland's proposed elections code was released today. As proposed, voters can rank up to 8 candidates.
I feel compelled to comment on your interview with Mr. Scott. Full disclosure: I opposed the proposed charter and was part of the Partnership for Common Sense Government, largely because of the proposed single transferable voting method to be used in 4 three member districts- untested in any multimember district council election in the United States.
First of all, it is clear that the Charter commission sold the voters a bill of goods with respect to the votie allying method. The auditor's presentation to the City Council on June 29, 2022 included The Charter Commission’s Progress Report # 6, their final report dated June 2022.
That report- submitted on behalf of the entire Commission (or at least the 17 of 20 who supported it) clearly states that “Ranked choice voting would give Portland voters the ability to indicate all of the candidates they support in order of preference by marking their ballots to indicate "1st choice, 2nd choice, 3rd choice, etc." for as many or as few as they care to rank.
So, when Mr. Scott states that only “some members of the Charter Commission made it clear that they wanted voters to be able to rank all candidates,” that is simply not the case. The Commission officially stated that was the case, and more importantly, told the voters that when the Commission gave final approval to the plan. In the Multnomah County Voter pamphlet, the statement in favor by Portland United for Change- the main advocacy group, stated that “You can rank some candidates, all of them, or just one.” That what voters were told would be the case.
The same final Commission report also stated that “Clear Ballot, the major vendor for Multnomah County, is preparing for a 2023 ranked choice voting election in Colorado that is very similar to the Charter Commission’s proposal.” That was untrue, and the Commission knew or should have known that. After doing some of my own research, which Commission staff could have easily done as well, I commented at the June meeting to the Council and Commission members who were in attendance remotely.
"The Commission report states that 'Clear Ballot, the major vendor for Multnomah County, is preparing for a 2023 ranked choice voting election in Colorado that is very similar to the Charter Commission’s proposal.'
After first reading the report on ranked choice by the research arm of the Colorado Legislature, I contacted election officials in the 2 Colorado jurisdictions scheduled to begin using RCV in 2023.
• Boulder: Boulder will be using instant run off RCV for mayor only. The 8 council members continue to be elected as before. The voting systems vendor: Dominion. The elections official had never heard of Clear Ballot.
• Broomfield City and County: Broomfield will move to instant runoff RCV for mayor and council. Council members are elected by ward, 2 each in 5 wards. The voting system vendor: Dominion.
I also confirmed with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office that those are the only 2 jurisdictions, as far as they know, scheduled to implement some form of RCV in 2023.
The point is that: (1) neither entity uses Clear ballot, so it likely that it will be a complex and expensive undertaking to change voting systems in Multnomah and the other 2 counties to a certified system that accurately tallies a first-in-the-nation voting method. (2) The new 2023 RCV elections in Colorado are not at all “very similar” to the single transferable vote method proposed for council elections in Portland. Why is the commission saying otherwise?
If I could get that information in a few phone calls, one wonders why Commission staff failed to do the same."
Now let’s turn to the ballot design itself. During the campaign, the Chatter Commission and advocates for the Charter used simple cartoon-like ballots with just several candidates and rankings, yielding a small number of “bubbles” on the ballot. The fact that this was misleading was pointed out. Since we recently had 10 or so candidates running for council seats, it seems conceivable that we would have as many as 30 candidates running for 3 seats in a district. 30 candidates with 30 rankings means 900 bubbles; this does not include space and bubbles for write-ins.
As you know, Cambridge is the only city in the United States to use single transferable voting in its council elections, though on at at-large- not district- basis. However, the method for vote tallying is the same whether at-large or by district. I repeatedly suggested that the Commission tell the voters what a ballot would look like in reality, using the Cambridge ballot as an illustration. My suggestion was ignored.
Mr. Scott stated: “A grid-style ballot with 24 candidates and 24 rankings just isn’t physically possible, unless we want to hand count ballots.” With all due respect, I believe that statement is not true. Surely if Cambridge can do it with 19 candidates/write-ins and 19 rankings, Portland can do the same- or more.
https://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/BD029816F80C4CDC89FD22B40EEBE4BE.ashx
Furthermore, the official Cambridge brochure on “VOTING BY PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION” states: “Computerized Ballot Tabulation: In 1997 the Election Commission computerized the City of Cambridge PR elections using a precinct-based optical scanning system and specially designed software.
Tabulating the Votes: The PR Count, which used to be performed manually during the course of a week by a staff of over a hundred, is now completed in a matter of minutes through the electronic sorting, counting, and transfer of votes.
If Cambridge can do it, one must ask: why not Portland?
In closing, it seems that the County needs to go back to the drawing board and make every effort to come up with a system that counts “as many rankings as a voter wants,” just like the Charter Commission promised, rather than seemingly taking the easy way out by placing artificial and unnecessary limits on the number of allowed rankings.