Survey Shows Voters Want Changes to Portland Elections and Form of Government
New polling data released on Thursday, March 17th shows that Portlanders across the spectrum of income, race, and political beliefs support broad changes both to Portland’s form of government and how city leaders are elected.
News Coverage:
Portland Mercury: Portlanders Overwhelmingly Desire New Form of Government, Poll Finds
KATU News: Portlanders want change to elections, form of government, new poll shows
Willamette Week: New Poll Shows Most Voters Want to Change the City’s Form of Government
The poll was conducted by FM3 Research and shared in a briefing to the Portland Charter Commission, a body of 20 Portlanders charged with considering and drafting November 2022 ballot initiatives to amend the Portland City Charter, which dictates the city’s elections process and Portland’s uncommon commission form of government. Building Power for Communities of Color commissioned the research and conducted it in partnership with North Star Civic Foundation.
The survey was conducted between February 27th and March 3rd, 2022, among 620 likely November 2022 voters in Portland. Results are inclusive of an oversample of 62 additional self-identified voters of color plus 72 in the main sample, for a total of 134 voters of color surveyed.
Majorities of voters support a switch to either council/manager (52%) or mayor/council form (51%), and even broader majorities want multi-member City Council districts and ranked choice voting:
72% of Portland voters support ranked choice voting, or, “allowing voters to vote for more than one candidate for their geographic district and rank them in order of preference”.
Nearly three in five (58%) support multi-member districts–electing more than one council member to represent a geographic district–while just 29% oppose this idea.
Four in five Portland voters (80%) believe the current commission structure does not serve the city well.
Voters did not show a preference one way or the other between a mayor/council form of government and a council/mayor form of government, supporting both as alternative structures to the status quo commission form. Ranked choice voting, multi-member districts, and expanding the size of City Council all enjoy broad support.
The polling was presented on Thursday evening via a video meeting of the Portland Charter Commission. The slides from the briefing may be found here, and the video recording of the event will be made available at: https://www.portland.gov/omf/charter-review-commission/events/2022/3/17/public-opinion-research-presentation-charter
For more information about the Portland Charter Review process, visit this webpage from the Coalition of Communities of Color.
