San Francisco switched to district elections and ranked choice voting decades ago. What’s holding Portland back?

By Nathan Nayman, City Club Member

The questions many in Portland are asking about the structure of its government and how residents vote for representatives are not new ones.

Since the 1965 Voting Rights Act, many cities have considered whether at-large elections deliver fair and just representation. In fact, in many cases, federal courts compelled cities to examine the issue. Cases in the late 1960s and 1970s found that at-large voting disadvantaged minority groups. Cities that had implemented or continued to hold on to such systems to keep Black and other minority voters out of power were forced to change.

Interestingly, not all cities were required to end at-large voting. The U.S. Supreme Court has not found that all such systems are necessarily illegal and discriminatory. Some cities changed to avoid a court challenge, but many cities on the West Coast did not come under such scrutiny. In support of voting rights for all, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once commented, “Just as buildings in California have a greater need to be earthquake proofed, places where there is greater racial polarization in voting have a greater need for prophylactic measures to prevent purposeful race discrimination.”

In San Francisco, community leaders recognized the need for change in the 1970s. Switching from at-large voting, the city held its first district elections for Board of Supervisors in 1977. However, after the assassination of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, voters repealed the system.

It took nearly two decades before the city again approved district voting. In November 1994, San Francisco voters passed Proposition L, which created an elections task force to develop recommendations for a district system. The task force delivered its recommendations to the Board of Supervisors and in 1996 the proposed system was put on the ballot. It passed with nearly 57% of the vote and in 2000, San Francisco again had district elections.

In 2002, San Francisco followed district voting reform with instant runoff voting, or what is now commonly called ranked choice voting.

As a longtime community advocate and a former executive director of the Bay Area’s Committee on Jobs, I saw communities come together through this process and recognize their shared values. Coalition work on voting methods changed politics in the Bay Area and created systems that the people felt reflected them and their communities. In San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, I got to be part of diverse groups of residents and advocates who each brought their different ideas and proposals to the table and I saw how all those perspectives came together to make each proposal better.

I also saw a community that learned from the past and continued to improve its voting systems. For example, ranked choice voting was a new idea in 2002. Voters didn’t always understand that they could select their candidate of choice only once, but rather could rank several of the candidates based on their preferences. Looking back, it’s clear that new voting procedures would require a well-funded, laser-like focus on voter education. The education could take a year or two to ensure that everyone understands how to vote and to make sure their vote counted.

Change is possible. In fact, I believe it is a force of nature that cannot be stopped. It’s up to us to commit to a process that makes change equitable.

Today, we have an opportunity to develop an election system in Portland that truly reflects our democratic values. It’s clear we need more equitable representation, and better ways to choose our representatives.

Portland’s move to district representation could be more complex than San Francisco’s. Our current local government structure, the “commission system,” could not continue with representative voting such as district voting. However, like San Francisco, Portland doesn’t have to come up with all the answers in one ballot measure. We first need to agree to change. Once we do that, we can come together as a coalition of diverse communities to develop a plan and a vision for what that change looks like. It could take two elections or more, so the time to begin is now. We mustn’t wait any longer to embark upon the task of building the representative government that Portlanders truly deserve.