My opinion: This Democratic presidential contest will not employ ranked choice voting; let’s pretend it does

Let’s play a game.

Let’s pretend that readers of this publication get to pick the Democratic nominee for president, and did so via Portland's new ranked choice voting system, which will see its debut this fall.

In November, Portlanders will use a new type of election to select a mayor, auditor and city councilors. Rather than vote for one candidate, they'll rank their preferences from a list of candidates. This method will move to Multnomah County's elections in 2026, and voters this fall could expand the system statewide.

To help explain how this new system works, we asked readers to rank their choices for commander-in-chief, following President Joe Biden's decision to drop off the Democratic ticket earlier this month.

(That’s not how it’s going to work in the real world, obviously. While Portlanders will rank their preferences for city offices, the state's electoral college votes aren't changing, yet. This is just an exercise.)

Here’s how it works:

In ranked choice voting, voters are asked to rank their favorite candidates from their No. 1 pick to their No. 6 pick.

If a candidate gets 50% plus one vote on election night, he or she wins outright, just as they would in our current election system.

But, if no candidate crosses that threshold, the last-place candidate is eliminated. If your No. 1 vote had gone to that candidate, your No. 2 candidate now gets your vote.

Ballots are then recounted. If no one crosses the 50%-plus-one threshold, another candidate is eliminated, votes get redistributed to the remaining candidates, and ballots are counted again. And again, and again, until someone crosses the threshold.

After Biden dropped his reelection bid, we asked readers who should replace him at the top of the Democratic ticket, and we gave them 12 potential candidates: Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky; Pete Buttigieg, transportation secretary; Vice President Kamala Harris; Sen. Mark Kelly, Arizona; Gov. Wes Moore, Maryland; Gov. Gavin Newsom, California; Michelle Obama, former first lady; Gov. Jared Polis, Colorado; Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Illinois; Gina Raimondo, commerce secretary; Gov. Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania; and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan. People also could write-in another candidate if they chose.

And, as a thought experiment, we asked readers to rank them, from No. 1 to No. 12.

Vice President Harris came out on top; just like in the real world, where she’s garnered enough support to clinch the nomination at the Democratic convention in August.

But in our make-believe poll, she didn’t cross that 50%-plus-one threshold immediately. In the first round, she came in at a solid 43.75% of the vote, followed by Whitmer at 15.63%.

And yeesh, four of our contestants — Beshear, Polis, Pritzker and Raimondo — got no votes at all. Sorry, y’all.

In a real-life election using ranked choice voting, we would have to go to Round 2 to find our winner.

Beshear, Polis and Prizker weren't anyone's first choice, so they're eliminated completely from the race, as are Mark Kelly, Wes Moore and Josh Shapiro, who had the lowest 1st-choice rankings, with only 3% of voters choosing them. In this three-way tie, all of their votes will be redistributed.

Sound complicated? Let’s say that I voted for Shapiro as my No. 1 and for Harris as my No. 2. Under ranked choice voting, Shapiro gets booted off the island, and with Harris as my second choice, she inherits my vote. Another reader had Moore in No. 1 and Whitmer in No. 2. With Moore gone, Whitmer becomes their new top choice and gets their vote.

Redistributing the votes from our lowest ranked candidates, we then run the calculations from our readers’ choices and we came up with a Round 2 tally.

This time Harris got exactly 50% of our readers’ votes! She’s in, right? Well, no. The threshold, remember, is 50%-plus-1. Oh, so close.

Gavin Newsom and Michelle Obama, both tied with 6% of the vote, will be the next candidates to be eliminated. Readers who favored them get their votes redistributed to their No. 2 choices. If their second choice has already been eliminated, their No. 3 choice will get their vote.

We go to Round 3.

Finally, Harris crosses the threshold! At 53%, she has obtained a true majority, and gets to run for president in our thought exercise.

Ranked choice voting can seem complicated, but experts we've spoken with say that's only because people in our area haven’t seen it before. I recently got to speak to journalists from Alaska, Maine and San Francisco, where ranked choice voting has been the norm for a long time. They report no drop-off in voter participation when this form of elections was created. Moreover, they said, voters get used to it; moderate candidates tend to do better than those on the extreme left or the extreme right; and voters feel less disenfranchised. That’s because in traditional voting, my candidate either wins or loses, period. With this method, someone in my, say, top 3 might get the win.

In a little less than 100 days, Portlanders will give this a try. Then Multnomah County elections are next, and then maybe much of the rest of Oregon.

The concept is new to us. But it’s been around for decades and it’s been proven to work.

Stay tuned.