November 16, 2003
(Updated) Preferential Voting In Portland's Past
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
Turning once again to Jewel Lansing's Portland: People, Politics, and Power, 1851-2001, I find another piece of the City's history of which I was previously unaware, from the June 1913 election -- the first mayoral election under the new (and still in existence) commission form of government, which had just been adopted that May:
H. Russell Albee won election as the city's new mayor. A controversial preferential voting system (today called "instant runoff") allowed voters to select first, second, and third choices for mayor, so if no candidate received a majority, second and third choices would be tallied to avoid a run-off election. Albee failed by 1,108 votes to win a majority based only on first-choice votes, so all choices were counted.
I'm not enough along in the book to know if Lansing mentions when use of this preferential voting system was ended, but I find it fascinating that it once existed here in Portland.
I've been drawn to instant runoff voting (which you can read more about through the instant runoff voting website from the Midwest Democracy Center, or the instant runoff voting section of the Center for Voting and Democracy website) for some time now, mainly because from an informational perspective it packs more data -- in an officially-recorded manner -- about voter opinion into a single vote.
Technically, there's a Fair Vote Oregon, but their website appears to be unreachable. They do, however, also have a mailing list, but since the archive is for members only, I can't tell if it's active at all these days.
Update
Just reached the point in the book where the fate of such a system was determined. Part of a ballot measure in 1932 included a provision that instant runoff voting in Portland be eliminated.