Equal Vote Coalition, Oregon county clerks say no to ranked choice voting

Two advocates for election reform urge you to vote No on Measure 117.

Sara Wolk (Equal Vote Coalition): The Equal Vote Coalition is recommending a ‘No’ vote on ranked choice voting—No on Measure 117. And it was not a decision that we made lightly. It’s hard to be the bearer of bad news because we do strongly believe that we need change and that our voting system can be better, should be better and will be better if we have our way, but ranked choice voting as currently proposed has some serious deal-breakers.

[00:00:36] The big three (to lay them out right off the top) are: Number 1, ranked choice voting undermines our election security. The second one is voter error and wasted votes. The third one, that it’s been systematically oversold by advocates and by big money lobbyists intentionally going back years and years.

And these are in no particular order, because they’re all extremely important.

[00:01:09] For a long time, there’s been a bit of an internal debate within the election reform community about: ‘Sure, ranked choice voting may not be perfect, but is it better than the status quo? Is it a stp in the right direction?’ And it’s with a lot of careful consideration that we’ve come to the conclusion that no, we think it’s a step in the wrong direction.

[00:01:34] We think it specifically harms and undermines the voting reform movement. And we are seeing unprecedented backlash against ranked choice voting for very justified reasons, that’s actually seriously hurting better reforms like STAR voting, approval voting, Condorcet, ranked robin. Other options are out there that don’t have these serious issues that ranked choice voting as proposed has. But they’re getting thrown out with the bathwater.

[00:02:06] Alan Zundel (STAR Voting advocate): I first started promoting ranked choice voting 20 years ago. But that was just like tabling with the Green Party and handing out flyers. But it was about 10 years later that STAR voting was invented. And so that’s when I started looking into that and saw that it was superior in many ways.

So when I think about this measure in Oregon, the county clerks around the state had a lot of reservations about this bill, because they are traditionally in charge, I think, by law, for tabulating the votes, but this would make it difficult for them to do that. So it has to go to the central location. And in the current climate of suspicion about voting and tabulation, that’s just going to be a huge mess to thrown into the lap of whoever’s going to be the secretary of state and made election denialism, and all the concerns about that, even worse than it had been before.

[00:02:58] Sara Wolk (Equal Vote Coalition): I actually have the quote from one of the representatives for the Oregon Association of County Clerks.

[00:03:05] Brian Van Bergen (Oregon Association of County Clerks): My name is Brian Van Bergen. I work at the Marion County Clerk’s Office, here today representing the Oregon Association of County Clerks…

[00:03:12] Sara Wolk (Equal Vote Coalition): And this is from their testimony to the legislature. So, ‘Elections should be accessible—’

[00:03:20] Brian Van Bergen (Oregon Association of County Clerks): …Elections should be accessible, simple, affordable, predictable, secure, auditable, and yield timely and accurate results. RCV does none of these things.

[00:03:33] Sara Wolk (Equal Vote Coalition): ‘RCV does none of these things.’ So that’s very alarming to hear from your election official. These are the people who run our elections all around the state. They do it in a decentralized way with tons of checks and balances. And they’re looked at, Oregon elections are looked at all around the country as the gold standard for election integrity.

[00:03:58] John Q: With more on the three deal-breakers for ranked choice voting:

[00:04:02] Sara Wolk (Equal Vote Coalition): Number 1: Ranked choice voting undermines our election security.

[00:04:07] It requires centralized tabulation of the ballots. Full reporting of the results by precinct is impossible and tallying any subset of ballots, like early returns. For example, you can’t start tallying the rounds of elimination until you have all ballots in hand in one spot and that is massively problematic for our election integrity and our election security.

[00:04:34] It means that mistakes are easier to make, that they’re harder to catch. And when they do happen—as we know, humans are fallible—when mistakes happen, they’re less likely to be caught and corrected as we’ve now seen in both New York City and Alameda County—Oakland, California.

[00:04:52] An entire election has been mis-tallied, and nobody noticed, and the wrong winner was seated, and later they were like, ‘Whoops, we miscounted everything,’ and that is what happened in Oakland in 2022.

[00:05:08] We had the ranked choice voting election and they tallied the ballots and they accidentally did the steps in the wrong order. So they transferred votes before eliminating a candidate, so they did the steps in the wrong order. They certified the election. They published the results. They seated the winners and 50 days later, they sent the data over to FairVote for proprietary data analysis. The full data was never published publicly, but they did send it off to FairVote, who’s the number one lobbyist for ranked choice voting in the country.

[00:05:46] And FairVote discovered that they had mis-tallied not just one election, every single election. And in one case, they had actually seated the wrong winner. So that ended up having to be front-page news: ‘Oakland admits tallying error’ and right around the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

[00:06:08] The repercussions there are just massive in terms of undermining our democracy, undermining trust in our elections, and feeding into everything from hyperpolarization all the way up to potential civil war. It’s not something we can afford to play around with.

[00:06:27] Number 1, election security. And Measure 117 specifically removes the entire section of Oregon law that it can’t comply with. So it specifically has to roll back our election security protections in order to be implemented.

[00:06:45] The second one is voter error and wasted votes.

[00:06:52] Ranked choice voting: Most people misunderstand exactly how it works. You rank your candidates first choice, second choice, third choice, up to (I believe) six in Portland this election, and then votes are tallied in a series of elimination rounds where you count only the first-choice vote and then eliminate the last place candidate.

[00:07:17] And if one candidate has a majority of votes, then they’re declared the winner, but in all but the first round, it’s not actually a majority. It’s a majority of remaining nonexhausted ballots.

[00:07:34] So as the rounds go through, and you’re eliminating candidates, you’re also eliminating voters whose votes are unable to transfer to the next choice.

[00:07:45] And some people may have a next choice. Their second choice may even be preferred over all other candidates, but it’s never counted because of the order of elimination that determines which rankings will ultimately be counted and which will be discarded.

[00:08:02] The tabulation is pretty random. Changing the order of elimination can really change what ballot data is counted, and that can absolutely play favorites. Specifically, it can hurt voters who support a strong underdog candidate, whose favorite actually makes it to the final round, but eventually loses.

[00:08:25] Voters whose favorite is eliminated early in the process, earlier, will actually have an advantage over voters whose votes are eliminated later and then they’re just never able to transfer because their next choice may already be gone, or it may be too late. So that’s the ‘exhausted ballot’ argument.

[00:08:47] We can look to Benton County, where ranked choice voting was passed in 2016. That’s where we’ve been using it the longest here in Oregon. And their recent elections, actually, their last ones were the first ones where it actually went into multiple rounds of tabulation. And all that they published are the first-round, first-choice votes results, all the rest of the data is just missing there. And that’s because you can’t know which second choices and third choices and fourth choices are going to come into play and which ones will be ignored. In competitive elections that have multiple candidates, multiple rounds, most rankings that people put down on average will be ignored.

[00:09:31] And again, STAR voting, approval voting, ranked robin, none of these other voting methods out there that election science community members are promoting have exhausted ballots. This is something that’s unique to the current version of ranked choice voting that’s being promoted.

[00:09:50] And there’s another serious way ranked choice voting can waste your vote. In ranked voting, you’re ranking your candidates first choice, second choice, third choice. But if there’s multiple candidates, or if you like multiple candidates equally, that can void your ballot.

[00:10:08] It’s pretty common for a voter, especially a voter who’s newer to the system—or a voter who isn’t reading the instructions as carefully as we would like—for them to give two candidates the same ranking and just say, ‘This is my first choice. I like these two equally. I’ll give them both second choice.’ And that’s a very common voter error that can throw out your ballot if it does come into play.

[00:10:33] And studies from all over the country are now showing that ballots that are voided for voter error—this happens at much higher rates for already marginalized communities.

[00:10:47] That means lower-income voters; voters with less education; voters who don’t speak English as a first language; communities of color. Those are all communities that are much more likely to have their ballot voided either due to voter error or to have their vote not transfer because they’re not able to navigate this convoluted process.

[00:11:10] Yeah, absolutely a deal-breaker.

[00:11:14] The Oregon constitution has a really strong equal protections clause. It’s actually stronger than the national constitution on that front, and it guarantees that any right that I have, you should have as well. Let’s say we vote in an election, and as it happens, None of our first choices make it. Our first choices all end up eliminated. One of us might have their next choice counted. One of us might have their next choice ignored. Your next choice might be counted or it might not, depending on factors that are pretty random, .

[00:11:53] Sara Wolk (Equal Vote Coalition): So we do think that it violates ‘One person, one vote,’ and would love to see a legal ruling on that one.

[00:11:59] The third big reason that we’re opposing ranked choice voting Measure 117 is that it’s been systematically oversold by advocates and by big money lobbyists intentionally going back years and years.

[00:12:16] I actually was a ranked choice voting advocate and at my first in-person meeting where I met Alan actually, I was fact-checked by somebody else in the audience, who was like, well, you know, you have to qualify those claims, like it mitigates some of those issues, but it doesn’t eliminate them and so forth.

[00:12:35] And I pushed back, I argued and I volunteered for a research committee that did a deeper dive and I found that, the flyer I’d been given and most of the talking points I’d heard are systematically oversold.

[00:12:49] Just the claim it’s safe to vote your conscience. In ranked choice voting, ranking your favorite first choice can actually backfire and hurt your first choice. That’s a super counterintuitive, weird mathematical phenomena that can happen, but your vote can actually backfire. So it is not safe to vote your conscience.

[00:13:14] It’s not predictable enough that voters should actually be strategic. And I think it’s really, really alarming to see hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars nationally being spent on this reform that is systematically telling people what they want to hear on one of the most important issues out there when they know it’s not true.

[00:13:38] So we have a lot at stake here, we have a lot to lose. Oregon’s actually a leader in election integrity and in voting reform. we have a lot of rights that we’ve fought for and they deserve to be celebrated and protected.

[00:13:54] Alan Zundel (STAR Voting advocate): And here’s the other thing about that is that there is a growing appetite to look at the way we vote and ask if we can do better. All across the country, there’s various reform efforts. Not all ranked choice voting. There’s also the open primaries. There’s been attempts to get star voting here in Oregon and approval voting elsewhere.

[00:14:16] So there is an appetite for this kind of thing, and it’s been growing rapidly considering how slowly it was growing in the first 20 years or so of the ranked choice voting movement here.

[00:14:28] But if you don’t do it carefully, you’re just going to turn people off on that. And it’ll just fail. The people that recognize the need for it will feel stymied because all the rest of the public becomes scared and it feels like, oh, we better stick with what we know and are familiar with rather than experimenting with these things that seem like they can blow up in our face.

[00:14:49] In Oregon here, I think they really should have waited to see how the ranked choice voting is going to work in Portland and Multnomah County and had a few rounds of elections there. So people can actually see it work and see, are they satisfied with it or not? Are the problems deal breakers or are they, you know, something they can tolerate? Without that, I don’t know why they push this through on the statewide level so early.

[00:15:13] I guess the ideal outcome in my mind of this referendum would be that it fails, but they get a relatively high ‘Yes’ vote just to show that people want change, but not this one.

[00:15:24] Sara Wolk (Equal Vote Coalition): We really owe it to voters to get this right. Voting reform is absolutely fundamental to being effective at every other issue we care about. And when done right, it can offer tremendous gains in terms of empowering voters, better accountability, more leverage, and better representation.

[00:15:45] But ranked choice voting as it’s being promoted has just a lot of deal-breakers.

[00:15:54] I really hope that voters will take some time to do a little research, definitely don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. But like any other public policy, it does help to follow the money, and we really do see ranked choice voting as essentially the greenwashing of the voting reform movement.

[00:16:15] John Q: Sara Wolk and Alan Zundel urge you to vote ‘No’ on Oregon Measure 117, ranked choice voting.