Portland City Council election follies update

They dropped a new batch of results in the Portland City Council elections on Saturday afternoon. Ten of the 12 winners are a lock, by everyone's account. And the other two folks shown below with an asterisk are probable winners. They have come in third, and thus won a seat, in every one of the five preliminary tallies released so far:

District 1 (four-year term): Candace Avalos, Loretta Smith, Jamie Dunphy*

District 2 (four-year term): Dan Ryan, Elena Pirtle-Guiney, Sameer Kanal

District 3 (two-year term): Steve Novick, Tiffany Koyama Lane, Angelita Morillo

District 4 (two-year term): Olivia Clark, Mitch Green, Eric Zimmerman*

The media are saying that Dunphy could still lose to either Terrence Hayes or Noah Ernst, and that Zimmerman could still lose to Eli Arnold. Both would be good outcomes, as far as I'm concerned, but I doubt that either will happen.

In Zimmerman vs. Arnold, Zimmerman has won in the five counts by the following margins: 1130, 1111, 1109, 1003, and 820. The trend is in Arnold's favor, but there aren't many more votes to count.

With Dunphy, his margins have been a little slimmer, but constant. In the first four tallies, he beat Ernst by 234, 672, 734, and 1010. And in the latest tally it came down to Dunphy vs. Hayes in the end, with Dunphy winning by 790.

As I understand it, there may not be a new run of numbers for at least a couple of days. Ballots postmarked by the 5th still count if they get to the elections office by tomorrow.

I've seen reports that something like 11,700 ballots are being challenged for questionable or missing signatures county-wide, and about 4000 other ballots are in a queue waiting to be counted. The large number of signature issues raises the distinct possibility that young voters, who don't sign their name on paper with a pen much any more, forgot how they wrote their name on their voter registration document. If they don't come forward and "cure" the problem, I believe it's by the 26th, out the window their votes go. Reportedly those whose ballots are challenged have been notified, I assume by snail mail.

With the occupants of the City Council chairs mostly (or entirely) identified, it's becoming clear what kind of council it's going to be, and I'm afraid the news isn't good, folks. As expected, the new city charter has brought out the worst in Portland voters. More on that shortly.

And the "rank choice" tomfoolery, which was touted as enhancing democracy, appears to have had the opposite effect. In the last Presidential election in 2020, the turnout in Multnomah County was close to 82 percent. The current figure for this election currently stands at less than 71 percent. Can you blame the Portland voters who opened the envelope, saw the two bizarre pages for the city races, and threw the whole ballot away, or put it aside and never got back to it?

Finally, it still holds true in three of the districts that the top three first-choice vote-getters won. Only in District 4 will a fourth-place finisher in the first-choice balloting make it to the finish line. Most of the vote-transfer folderol didn't make a difference in the outcome; you could have stopped after the first-choice round.

Not to mention all of the other flaws of this crazy system, which were clearly demonstrated in this inaugural run. I laid them out as best I could here.