I have a new report with Kevin Kosar and Jaehun Lee of the American Enterprise Institute:

Key Points 

• Portland, Oregon, used its decennial charter revision process to overhaul its method for electing the city’s legislators in 2022. 
• The new system divided the city into four districts, with each district represented by three members selected through ranked ballots. 
• Portland first used this new system in November 2024, and initial analysis indicates that it expanded the representativeness of the candidate pool and resultant council.

Much of the report’s latter half is dedicated to understanding voters’ use of the ballot. Here is one key finding from my analysis of the cast-vote record:

Our analysis, however, does not consider whether a ballot was valid. The shares of voters using seven or more rankings (Table 4, rightmost column) suggests some failure to understand or at least comply with voting instructions. Given the ballot’s six-choice format, the only way for a voter to rank more than six candidates was to give at least two candidates the same ranking.