Major media outlets have begun to notice how two recent electoral reforms are shaping up in Portland. One of these is an enlarged city council. The other is the adoption of elections by single transferable vote (STV), long held up by American reformers as a form of proportional representation (PR).
This “PR-plus-larger-assembly” model has many defenders. Some think it could lead to more pro-growth housing policies. Yet Portland’s experience so far risks reinforcing old concerns about instability that could derail similar efforts nationwide. For those who want to see PR adopted in more places, the council needs to turn things around.
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PR is the principle that a party’s share of votes should match its share of legislative seats. Systems built on that principle treat votes for candidates as votes for their parties, too. Thus, it becomes possible to give each party a share of seats in direct proportion to its vote share.
STV, Portland’s system, is not built on the PR principle. It bypasses parties by asking voters to rank-order candidates. However, unlike under the ranked-choice system now used in many cities (including New York City party primaries), winning a seat in this system requires just a small fraction of the votes cast in a district. Reformers justify calling this by PR by arguing it gives voters the ability to form whatever “parties” they want, not just choose from the ones that appear on a ballot. Thus they now call STV “proportional ranked-choice voting.”
PR has long been popular with supporters of multiparty politics. Recently, opponents of gerrymandering have supported it, too, since it presumes districts with multiple seats and could reduce gerrymandering’s effectiveness.
In local elections, PR’s main benefit is that it can deliver majority rule and minority representation. The most common systems used in American cites tend not to achieve the latter. Single-seat districts penalize groups—such as conservatives in New York—whose voters are spread across districts. “At-large” elections, in which a single slate of candidates can win every seat in a multi-seat district, have historically disadvantaged nonwhite voters, including in Portland.
Whatever the rules in place, however, majority rule requires a majority coalition—a group that sets aside its differences to organize government and get things done. This is as true under PR as it is under so-called “winner-take-all” rules.
Portland’s city council currently lacks a majority coalition. Instead, it is equally divided between an obstructive Progressive Caucus and a disunified opposition. The council has struggled to delegate work to committees, set meeting agendas, and manage use of its time. It has spurned pro bono consulting that would help it work through these issues. Local reporting links the gridlock to the Progressive faction’s coordination via text-message conversations held alongside regular meetings.
The Progressives’ collective decision to jam up council business could be a problem both for Portland’s experiment and PR’s future nationwide. Today, most people evaluate electoral systems based on whom they elect, not the styles of politics they produce. Alaska and New York City, for example, have ranked-choice voting. Voters’ opinions of those systems likely depend on their opinions of Senator Lisa Murkowski or frontrunning mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, respectively. Portland now has a socialist council delegation that PR critics can blame if they want to stop its progress.
Similar concerns about leftist obstruction sank the PR idea in the past. When American cities began adopting STV as “PR” before World War II, critics claimed that it was just like the European PR systems that purportedly had led to fascism. They pointed to the Cincinnati City Council, where a politician favoring public utility ownership was positioned to decide which coalition would be in charge.
Popular fear of socialism, anti-civil rights sentiment, and the election of two Communist Party members in New York further soured Americans on the system. By about 1960, the PR cause was dead.
If it wants to avoid a replay, Portland needs to make some changes. One option is to make it harder to become a candidate, with higher filing fees and/or signature requirements. In November, the city had eight times as many candidates as seats to fill. Under STV, a pool that large can increase the likelihood of seeing unpopular but intensely supported candidates elected.
Another option is to switch to some more straightforward form of PR, one that encourages candidates to form parties before elections. Neither approach would guarantee a working majority, but either could help.
Efforts at reform, though, are nonetheless running into the same walls as the council’s internal business. One member of city government reportedly said that she was reluctant to “make too many changes so soon after last year’s overhaul.”
The situation in Portland is unlikely to improve without compromise. Theoretical models and historical data support the idea that parties will emerge and adapt to STV. But the models were built with national elections in mind, and the data come from cities where reformers took party-building seriously before the reform.
PR advocates have long believed their preferred systems lead to compromise. Portland has an opportunity to show the nation that this is true. Failure could hobble a reform movement whose ideas are worth considering.
Photo by Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
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