My Portland Voter’s Guide

10 min readOct 24, 2016

The Great Hurricane of Bullshit that most of us call the US 2016 election season has crowded our backlit screens, and our minds, with a grotesque blizzard of messages about how to vote or how not to vote, designed to make us respond emotionally instead of rationally. This campaign has been triggering and exhausting for many of us. Combined with relatively high stakes, and a fundamental contradiction in how our electoral system works, this season presented us with some very challenging decisions. That’s why, once our ballots arrived in the mail, we decided to talk about our voting choices together: to be sure that we were each making what we believed to be the best possible decision.

This is not a complete list, because our ballots are really long. If I missed something that you care about, leave a question and I’ll edit this accordingly.

US President: Heisenballot

I really wanted Bernie Sanders to be president. But if you vote for anyone other than Donald Trump or Gary Johnson, you’ll agree with me in at least one meaningful way.

I’m writing this two weeks before Election Day, and I haven’t made a final choice as to who I think should be president. I haven’t decided yet because of the conflict between my operational ethics and my aspirational ethics.

By operational ethics, I’m referring to the need to help keep our government working well enough to protect us from other people’s violence, and to help keep us, and the people we care about, from extreme deprivation. In operational ethics, stability and safety is the foundation upon which we can bring about incremental improvements in public life. Operational ethics favor working with the way the world is rather than the way we want the world to be. Knowledge and experience matter.

Operational ethics also gives us the mentality of having to vote for the lesser of two evils, because of the potential consequences of our votes should we inadvertently help bring about an intolerable outcome. Looking at politics through the lens of operational ethics, people who vote for marginal candidates are taking important votes away from the prime struggle between the two major candidates.

Thanks to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, aspirational ethics have also come into play. The current global trade regime has undeniably uplifted many millions of people, and has helped foster world peace in a profound way. At the same time, increasingly extractive capitalism and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs has caused a wide swath of discontent in the American public. The prevailing global ideology, to which both Democrats and Republicans subscribe, has caused those parties to neglect their responsibilities to ordinary US citizens and to the planet, in the furtherance of the agendas of large campaign donors. More of us have become angry about losing our jobs, having to pay off student loans until we reach old age, watching the unchecked destruction of what remains of our ecosystem, and facing tighter and tighter constraints on the ability to fully live our lives, among many other things. Popular discontent is the soil in which marginal causes, and marginal candidates’ support, sprout and grow. In a democracy, it is right and just that mainstream candidates who grow out of touch with their constituencies see those constituencies begin to evaporate.

Other factors that have caused this election to play out the way it has include increasing public awareness of the global ideological container in which we live our political life, and an increasing realization that most of the “information” that we watch and read online is false or misleading, designed to make us either withdraw into apathy, or act contrary to our own interests. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump emerged in the absence of leaders who were truly in touch with their constituencies, by speaking directly to their core concerns and proposing solutions that their audiences want to hear.

Seen through the lens of aspirational ethics, people who are choosing a major party candidate are buying into a corrupt system, and working against the need to solve deeper issues with the fundamental structure of our society.

As I see it, both of these ethical impulses are valid. But because of the way our electoral system is designed, I can only choose to be ethical in one of these two ways, not both. I know many smart people who are taking one or the other ethical stance, and who speak quite passionately about it. The beauty of this situation is that both orientations are right, and their underlying truths reveal the broken game theory in our electoral system: If I vote for a marginal candidate, and everyone reading this agrees with me, then the intolerable opponent is more likely to get elected, and I don’t want that to happen. (With ranked-choice voting, I wouldn’t need to choose between my long-term vision and my groundedness in reality. But that’s not the system we have today.)

For now, I’ll let my downballot votes below stand as examples of how I’ve tried to navigate this conflict. I’ll be voting for someone other than Trump or Johnson. In addition to the obvious choices, I’ve also been following the progress of Cthulhu’s campaign; his case is really compelling. But I’m biased, because I know that I will be eaten first.

US Senate: Shanti Lewallen (Working Families Party)

We really like Ron Wyden (D), who is running for re-election this year. In almost every area of government, he has done well by us. I happen to like him as a senator because of his solid support for reforming our surveillance programs, as well as his seemingly sincere interest in helping Oregonians live a better life.

The people of Oregon also love him back, according to polls that show him over 20 points ahead of his Republican challenger. That means that I have some leeway to really think about the future, and how each candidate’s ideas can best help move us forward as a society.

I hope Wyden continues as senator, but I won’t be voting for him this year because we need better-structured trade deals put in place.

Both Ron Wyden and Earl Blumenauer (running for re-election to the House from Oregon’s 3rd district) are facing opposition over their support of TPA (fast-track authority) for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Wyden is 20+ points ahead in the polls, and Blumenauer doesn’t even face a Republican challenger, so the option to send a message to them about this becomes more realistic.

In the presidential race, it’s easy to decide not to vote for a major party candidate and already know something about other candidates. But for the Oregon US Senate race, we had to get up to speed on the other options:

We looked at all their websites, and decided to deep-dive into Navickas and Lewallen. Lewallen had a lot more written material on his site, whereas Navickas has easily-accessible videos. Lewallen seems to have thought things out just a little bit more than Navickas has, so we went with Lewallen.

US House (OR-3): David Delk (Oregon Progressive Party)

As with Ron Wyden, I’m generally happy with Earl Blumenauer (D) for many different reasons. I would enthusiastically vote for him in the next cycle if he tweaks his trade policy just a little bit more toward reforming our trade regime, in addition to mitigating the damage. Having said that, his vote for trade adjustment assistance tells me that he’s at least somewhat plugged in to the realities of globalization in practice.

There are no polls out that I can see anywhere, but given the partisan makeup and history of the 3rd Congressional district, the probability of Blumenauer winning seems extremely high. So we’re voting for Delk as an illustration of what can happen on our current course if not enough is changed.

Oregon Governor: Kate Brown (D)

This race has been in flux, so operational ethics take over. Kate Brown seems competent at her job, and has enough of the right priorities.

Oregon Secretary of State: Brad Avakian (D)

He’s in a tied race against Republican Dennis Richardson. Avakian has all the right endorsements, whereas Republican secretaries of state have exhibited an irritating tendency to want to restrict voting rights where they operate. Given this, we’re voting for Avakian.

Portland City Commissioner, Position 4: Chloe Eudaly

Portland has serious problems with housing right now. I lived in San Francisco and Seattle during periods of tech-fueled increases in prices for housing, and the same phenomenon has begun in Portland over the last few years. The acceleration in price increases seems to be taking place more quickly here than in SF or Seattle in the past, and has been especially difficult on many of our friends, even those living on the far outskirts of town.

Chloe Eudaly is a long-time renter and small business owner living in Portland. Regardless of whether she is able to enact rent control, she has given every indication that she would shake things up in city government if elected. Her opponent, incumbent Steve Novick, is capable and has accomplished a number of good things while in office, and if he were not running against Eudaly, we’d consider voting for him. But housing is super-important, and he hasn’t demonstrated that he is in touch on this issue. So we’re voting for Chloe Eudaly.

East Portland Soil and Water District, Director, At-Large position 1: Rick Till

He seems to care a lot about protecting forests, and he’s an incumbent. Besides, he’s running unopposed.

Oregon Measure 94: Yes

Since 1960, judges in Oregon have had to retire at age 75. That doesn’t make sense if a judge is still of sound mind, and willing to keep applying their knowledge and experience to judicial work.

Oregon Measure 95: No

This would allow universities to invest in equities. Equities take many forms, with different volatilities. Universities obviously own real estate, and that makes more sense to me in terms of preserving asset value than the stock market.

Also, based on the way this is worded, the public would not even get to see the details of where university money is being invested, how the hedge-fund managers who will manage university funds are hired, or what their decisions happen to be. That, to me, seems like a recipe for corruption.

Given all this, voting No felt like the right tradeoff.

Oregon Measure 97: Yes

Measure 97, if passed, would impose a 2.5% tax on revenue that exceeds $25 million each year, on C corporations.

The saturation of our media by well-funded, scary advertising plays a role here for me. Whenever I see a ton of shiny-looking ads that try to get me to vote a certain way, my first impulse is to question who is paying for the ads, and who is opposing them. As things stand, I don’t place a lot of value in dire predictions around what will happen if this is passed, because Oregon’s corporate income tax rate is among the lowest in the country.

It’s possible that our prices may increase by a relatively small amount, depending on how this tax works its way through supply chains. But given the state’s upcoming financial issues, bringing in new revenue makes sense in the long term.

Oregon Measure 98: Yes

This guarantees the spending of at least $800 per student on either technological education, career placement, college-level educational opportunities, and/or dropout-prevention measures. Oregon has the third lowest high school graduation rate in the US, and educating kids about technology is a good thing, so voting Yes seems like the best choice.

Oregon Measure 99: Yes

This measure helps ensure that every middle school student in Oregon gets to have at least one week of outdoor education every year. For humans to become responsible stewards of the ecosystem, it’s important to increase the time kids get to spend out in what nature we have left.

Oregon Measure 100: Yes

This makes the purchase, sale, offer for sale, or possession with intent to sell the parts of certain animals (elephant, rhinoceros, whale, tiger, lion, leopard, cheetah, jaguar, pangolin, sea turtle and shark and ray species) a state crime. Regardless of how much commerce this removes, measures like this one in other states and countries help remove the economic incentive to hunt endangered species. It might make trafficking in rare animal parts just a teeny bit harder.

Multnomah County Measure 26–184: Yes

This requires each candidate for Multnomah County office to disclose the five largest donors (over $500), and limits contributions otherwise. The Portland Mercury endorsement page explains this fairly well:

The premise is that candidates won’t suck up to a few fat-pocketed donors looking to sway public policy with the help of their checkbook, but instead would lavish attention on many more small donors. Proponents say this would help even the playing field for candidates who don’t cater to the wealthy.
We think that’s a good thing, and we urge you to approve the measure.

Multnomah County Measure 26–185: Yes

As Willamette Week describes:

This is basically a housekeeping matter. Currently, the Multnomah County chair is responsible for working with the state Legislature to appoint members to the county’s charter review committee, which meets every six years to discuss reforms to the county’s charter. The chair’s office also convenes the committee. This change would move that responsibility to the county’s Office of Citizen Involvement, in hopes the office could better promote the committee and draw more diverse applicants.

The Office of Citizen Involvement exists to help ordinary citizens become more involved in county-level decision-making. Helping ordinary people to influence how county government works is a very useful mission.

Portland Measure 26–180: Yes

I had initially assumed that I would vote No on this, until I read the Portland Mercury endorsement:

Even if Portland voters approve this city-wide 3 percent recreational pot tax, you’ll still be able to get legally high for cheaper than before. The state legislature has approved knocking sales tax on recreational marijuana down from 25 percent to 17 percent, starting on New Years Day, and has allowed local jurisdictions to slap on their own tax, up to 3 percent. This tax — championed by City Commissioner Amanda Fritz — is just that. And if it passes? The 20 percent markup you see at the register is still 5 percent less than you’re paying for recreational pot now. Medical marijuana will remain untaxed.