[EM] Oregon legislature approves ballot measure for ranked choice voting

[Richard, the VoteFair guy]

Real election-reform progress!

The Oregon legislature (both the House and Senate) passed a bill that 
will put the option of adopting ranked choice voting on the Oregon 2024 
election ballot!

If the Oregon voters approve it in 2024, which is likely, ranked choice 
voting will be used starting in the 2028 election.

Here's a link to the well-designed wording of this House Bill 2004:

https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2023R1/Downloads/MeasureDocument/HB2004/Enrolled

Interestingly the legislators in both the House and Senate voted in 
favor of this bill by about a 2 to 1 ratio, so it passed easily.

For context, there have been several citizen-initiated attempts to get 
enough signatures to put election-method reform initiatives on the 
ballot, which amounts to attempts to bypass the legislature.

Also a majority of voters in the city of Portland (Oregon's largest 
city) voted to adopt a charter reform that included using IRV to elect 
the mayor and using STV to elect city councilors.  That use of ranked 
choice voting will start next year in the 2024 election.

For compatibility, HB 2004 (the statewide bill) allows (but does not 
require) STV elections.

The IRV elections for Portland mayor uses a FairVote-promoted version of 
IRV, so controversial results could occur with its first use (as 
happened in Alaska).  In contrast, I expect the use of STV (to elect 3 
city councilors from each of 4 districts) is likely to work well.

Significantly this statewide reform does NOT adopt ranked choice voting 
for electing state legislators.  That's because of concerns the ballot 
would require too many ballot pages at the same time as introducing 
ranked choice ballots.  The election officials who have to count the 
ballots insisted on this delay.

I'll take credit for insisting that this statewide Oregon version of IRV 
does not specify how to count two or more marks in the same choice 
column.  (All Oregon voters mark ballots at home, not at public polls.) 
This flexibility allows counting these marks correctly when better 
certified election software becomes available.

Two years earlier the FairVote organization tried to push through a 
version that refers to these as "overvotes" and ignores them or skips 
over them.  The adopted wording avoids this issue by not mentioning this 
counting detail.

Yet this "detail" is important.  If the marks are counted as overvotes, 
then either there must be more than 6 choice columns when there are more 
than 6 candidates, or else a voter cannot rank their most-disliked 
candidate below all the other candidates.

An interesting provision that I also may have influenced (through 
earlier video meetings with the experts who wrote the amendment) is that 
if a city or county chooses to use ranked choice ballots in a general 
election, and if the primary election does NOT use ranked choice 
ballots, and if a party's nominee does not get at least half the votes, 
then the candidate who gets the second-largest number of votes also goes 
to the general election.

The reason for allowing a second nominee is to defeat the "blocking 
tactic" that exploits the current limit of one nominee from each party.

This blocking tactic was used in 2008 when some Republicans gave money 
to Barack Obama to block Hillary Clinton from reaching the general 
election.  Those Republicans expected Obama to lose because of racial 
prejudice.  Also they overlooked the appeal of Obama's "hope and change" 
slogan, which many voters regarded as a request for overdue political 
reforms.

Allowing each (popular) party to have a second nominee, plus using 
ranked choice ballots in the general election, defeats this blocking tactic.

When HB 2004 was considered in the House and Senate "Rules" committees, 
I gave verbal testimony via video, in addition to written testimony. 
Here's my recent written testimony (which is similar to what I said via 
video) to the Senate committee members:

https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2023R1/Downloads/PublicTestimonyDocument/101675

The words "The people who criticize the counting details in this bill 
..." refer to the fans of STAR voting who testified against this bill. 
They have hopes they can get enough signatures for a ballot initiative 
that would adopt STAR voting.

I share their dislike of the FairVote version of IRV.  Yet I support 
using ranked choice ballots and eliminating candidates one at a time. 
So I regard this Oregon version of IRV as a stepping-stone to better 
counting methods that will better identify which candidate to eliminate. 
  Eventually I want a Condorcet-compliant method, but that's in the 
distant future.

Privately to some state legislators I've communicated my hope that, in 
the future, Oregon law can be refined to eliminate pairwise losing 
candidates when they occur.  The HB 2004 wording makes it possible to 
make this change by adding just two sentences.  The second added 
sentence would define a pairwise losing candidate as a candidate who 
would lose every one-on-one contest against every remaining candidate.

In contrast, an earlier bill written by the FairVote organization would 
have made it difficult to add this refinement (of eliminating pairwise 
losing candidates).

Overall I regard this 2024 ballot referendum as a big step in the right 
direction!

Richard Fobes
The VoteFair guy