PDX Council Candidates to Watch - November 2024

Future Portland Endorsement

Questionnaire Link

Responses are due by 6pm on Tuesday, September 3rd. We apologize for the short turnaround and may consider accepting late applications but they will likely not be reviewed in time for your endorsement to be included with your Voter Pamphlet submission.

FIND YOUR CITY DISTRICT - CLICK HERE!

FIND YOUR CITY DISTRICT - CLICK HERE!

Candidates for office must raise a certain number of contributions to qualify for city matching funds under Small Donor Elections

  • Candidates for mayor must raise donations of $5-$350 from at least 750 Portland donors

  • Candidates for council or auditor must raise donations of $5-$350 from at least 250 Portland donors 

Candidates must raise the required number of contributions from individuals living in the City of Portland. They can raise funds from donors living outside of Portland, but only donations from Portland residents count towards the qualifying requirement.

You can donate to anyone in any district, not just the one you reside in.

Remember - word of mouth is key! Tell your friends & neighbors to spread the word, use your social media. Like / Follow / Share every candidate’s posts!

November 2024 - Rank Choice Voting

Portland is implementing the new city charter starting with our ballots in November 2024, which expands the current city council from 4 to 12 members starting in January 2025, and eliminates the May 2024 primary. It also adds single-transferable rank choice voting method (RCV) for all city of Portland positions and multi-member districts.

The city has been split into 4 districts (see link above to find what district you reside in) and each district will have 3 council members representing them. Council members can be elected from any area of your district, so you will not necessarily have diversity of residence unless you look into what neighborhood all of the candidates live in.

You will get to rank 6 positions total on your ballot for your district only. There are already 10+ people running in every district; District 2 has 21 people registered as of March 16th. So you will not be able to rank every single candidate in your district, just your top 6 choices. You do NOT have to rank all 6 positions if you do not like 6 people, which is important and we’ll explain shortly why. We do recommend ranking at least 3 people since there are 3 open positions - picking only 1 person will effectively disenfranchise you from having a voice in choosing all 3 of your representatives.

The reason we say do not select 6 candidates on your ballot if you do not like all 6, is because this is not a ‘basic’ form of rank choice voting we have chosen for our city council election. The mayor and auditor will be chosen using a ‘basic’ form of RCV, but city council will be using a method called ‘single transferable vote’.

What this means is that once a candidate reaches 25% of the votes, subsequent votes will not be counted for that person, and the #2 choice will be given the ‘first/top’ vote on that ballot. So ranking someone you do not prefer could actually end up helping them win more votes to help them over the finish line in the end. See the fun cartoon the original charter commission had created then pulled down because this explanation upset voters who thought they had chosen ‘regular’ RCV.

We will endorse up to 6 candidates per district, but we will not endorse all 6 positions if we do not feel there are 6 qualified candidates.