In 2024, Democrat-endorsed candidates swept all seven seats on the Bend Oregon, city council - even though city elections are technically nonpartisan. Democrats certainly outnumber Republicans in Bend, but 20 percent of city voters are registered with the G.O.P., and many more are not affiliated or are registered with smaller parties. Those voters don't get their views represented in their city government.
In southern Oregon's Jackson County, the representation failure is reversed. Democratic or Independent candidates have won more than 40 percent of the vote for every county commissioner contest over the last five general elections - but Republicans consistently hold all three seats. Even though county voters are split between the two major parties, Democrats are locked out of county policy decisions.
Sightline catalogued voting methods in all Oregon counties and the 50 most populous cities (view and download the list here). The findings: Almost all of Oregon's cities and counties operate with election methods that tend to fall into the same pattern of misrepresentation. These local governments use outdated, easily gamed voting methods.
Fortunately, Oregon's constitution, unlike those of neighboring states, enables localities to choose a more effective path: proportional representation.
Nearly all local governments in Oregon - every county and all but one of the state's 50 largest cities - use one of three methods of electing councils and commissions, or some combination. While each of them can, and often does, achieve adequate representation for residents, all three are susceptible to political manipulation and to oscillation between political extremes.
Bloc voting can shift governing bodies wholesale based on whatever group turns out the most voters.
At-large positions similarly give majority viewpoints unfair sway and set up additional avenues for political gamesmanship.
And single-winner wards (or districts) put voters at the mercy of artificial lines, including gerrymandering.
Voters in more than one-third of Oregon's 50 largest cities and many more smaller towns, from Baker City to Yachats and Lake Oswego to Redmond, are familiar with bloc voting, even if they don't know it by name; it's a common method for electing multiple people to city council at once. But those candidates are not assured to reflect the diversity of public preferences.
With bloc voting, voters get the same number of votes as there are council seats up for election. In a three-seat election, for example, voters pick their three choices from the list of all candidates, and the three with the most votes win spots on the council. Some cities use bloc voting for all seats at once, while others elect some of their members in midterm years and the rest in presidential years.
Bloc voting might seem like a simple method - choose three, elect three - but the outcomes can belie what voting is supposed to achieve. Instead of electing a council that can represent everyone, whichever group or faction gets the most votes can easily win all the seats. In partisan elections, bloc voting frequently means that the party with the most votes sweeps the board; in nonpartisan elections, candidates on either side of local wedge issues (like police funding or low-income housing) might win every single position even if voters are closely divided. A small shift in voter preference can flip half or all of a local council, so residents might have to endure dramatic policy swings; a policing or housing ordinance adopted one year could be reversed the next.
Plus, when votes are close, there's no guarantee that the top vote-getters are actually the most popular candidates. Take the city of Forest Grove, for example. In 2024, six candidates ran for the three open seats in a bloc voting election, and all received between 12 and 19 percent of the vote. The third-place winner, Brian Schimmel, beat out next-place runner-up, Peter Truax, by less than half a percentage point. With few...