While the measure has strong support from advocates of voting reform, not everyone is happy about the possible change. Rural elections officials worry it will cost their counties more money than they can afford, cause confusion for voters, and provoke election fraud accusations.
“If it passes, I just hate to see what it’s going to do to the election landscape and the clerk’s landscape across the state, because it will be costly,” said Steve Dennison, clerk of Deschutes County in central Oregon. Deschutes is a single-county metropolitan area that includes the fast-growing cities of Redmond and Bend.
“That cost means not only are the counties footing the bill, but there are going to be other services that counties won’t be able to provide because they’re footing the bill for this additional cost,” Dennison said.
If passed, the ballot measure – called Measure 117 – would allow voters to rank political candidates by preference on their ballot.
If a candidate wins the majority of “first-preference” votes, they win the election. If there’s no majority, then the candidate with the fewest number of first-preference votes is eliminated. The next-preference votes from the ballots that ranked the eliminated candidate as their first choice are then tallied, and if there’s a majority vote on a particular candidate, a winner is declared. If not, the process is repeated until one candidate wins the outright majority vote.
Advocates say this process gives voters more choice in elections, which is a “better way to vote,” according to Blair Bobier, one of the founders of the advocacy organization Oregon Ranked Choice Voting. “Places that have been using ranked-choice voting wind up having much more representative bodies that better represent the communities that they are elected from,” Bobier said.
With state Representative Dan Rayfield, Bobier co-chaired a successful 2016 campaign in Benton County, Oregon, that implemented the state’s first countywide ranked-choice voting system. Since 2016, Multnomah County (the most populous Oregon county) and the multi-jurisdictional city of Portland have also adopted ranked-choice voting. Now, Bobier and his fellow advocates hope the system will soon be used statewide.
But rural and small-county elections officials aren’t convinced ranked-choice voting would be as rose-hued as the advocates say it will.
A top concern for many of them is money. That’s because counties pay for their own elections, regardless of whether they’re for local, state, or federal offices.
Implementing Measure 117 is predicted to be costly: A July 2024 memorandum from the Oregon Center for Voting & Elections estimated that the price tag would be “roughly $10 million in start-up costs and $2 million per year afterwards” statewide. That includes the price of printing an extra ballot page, postage, and any voting software updates.
In Benton County, another small metropolitan area that includes the city of Corvallis, the elections office saw firsthand a jump in the price of elections when the county implemented ranked-choice voting in 2020.
“I couldn’t get into numbers, but I can say, yes, the cost does go up because you have to print more ballots in order to test the system,” said James Morales, Benton County clerk. A new voting system would have to be tested in every Oregon county before being used in an election. “So that takes more people, more ballots, more staff time, and more time for testing,” Morales said.
While Measure 117 calls for county clerks and the secretary of state to jointly produce a budget report and submit a funding request for each county’s projected expenses, some clerks are skeptical that they would get the money they need to implement ranked-choice voting.
“It’s not really in the [state] constitution whether or not they have to fund it or whether it’s considered an unfunded mandate,” said Rochelle Long, Klamath County clerk. Klamath is a nonmetropolitan county in southern Oregon that includes the small city of Klamath Falls and an abundance of public lands such as Crater Lake National Park.
Long is the director of the recently formed “Concerned Election Officials” political action committee that opposes Measure 117.
Under the law, clerks would have to file their funding request with the state legislature by March 15, 2025. Long said that if rural counties do end up paying for the bulk of the implementation cost without state help, “other necessities that counties have are going to have to be pushed to the backburner to pay for a different form of voting.”
A 2023 Reed College report found that across Oregon, elections offices are “underfunded and understaffed,” with some of the most rural counties allocated just one full-time employee to run elections and handle document filings like marriage licenses and deeds. Many county clerks from small and mid-size counties told researchers that they have fewer staff than they did 10 years ago, even though the number of registered voters has steadily increased because of Oregon’s automatic voter registration policy.
Voter confusion is another concern. Measure 117 requires the secretary of state to run a voter education program that would provide the electorate information on how ranked-choice voting works. This information would be provided in English and the other five most commonly spoken languages in Oregon.
But learning a new voting system can be a barrier for some voters, according to Dag Robinson, the clerk of Harney County, a rural county in southeast Oregon. “We get really, really concerned as elections officials about voter exhaustion when looking at the ballot,” Robinson said.
Harney County is the largest county by land area in Oregon but sixth least-populated, with roughly 7,500 residents. Many residents live far from any urban center and internet and cell service can be spotty, creating hurdles for sharing educational material about Measure 117.
Another pressing concern is election transparency. County clerks across the country are fending off accusations of election fraud, a trend spurred by unfounded accusations after the 2020 presidential election and the subsequent January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building.
Some Oregon county clerks are worried that ranked-choice voting could make people lose trust in their elections offices.
Currently, Oregon ballots are counted using three different vote tally machine systems: ES&S, Clear Ballot, and HART. A county’s final results end at the local elections office.
With ranked-choice voting, the first count of the ballots would be handled by local elections offices, but they are eventually sent to the secretary of state’s office because every ballot’s ranking would need to be tallied against each other. This is how Alaska and Maine – the only states in the country with statewide ranked-choice voting – conduct elections.
County clerks say a centralized tally could make people more skeptical about the results.
“This is where that high level of concern comes up for me as a county clerk, because I won’t be able to say to somebody, if it’s a statewide contest, ‘I know that [the secretary of state] did it right,’” said Lisa Gambee, Wasco County clerk.
Wasco is a nonmetropolitan county in northern Oregon.
Gambee has no doubt that the state office would accurately count ballots, but she worries her constituents might not agree.
“I cannot personally guarantee what happens once that first round of tabulation goes out of my hands,” she said.
Gambee said she and many of her colleagues are holding their breath in anticipation for what might happen come November. “It’s going to really be hard [to implement], especially for some of the smaller rural counties where they don’t have that kind of funding and budget,” Gambee said.
If Measure 117 passes, county clerks will have to test and implement ranked choice voting in their communities by January 1, 2028.
This article was first published by Daily Yonder. Read the original article.
