PORTLAND, Ore. — Longshot candidate Keith Wilson ended up taking a big lead in the race for Portland mayor in initial results Tuesday night. A dozen leading candidates also emerged in Portland's city council races, but none of those results are final; there are many ballots still to be counted, and ranked-choice voting adds to the potential for shakeups as more votes are tallied.
Multnomah County is handling the ranked-choice vote count for Portland voters, and the county has pledged to release updated vote totals in batches until the count is complete — but only one new batch per day, which means the initial count released Tuesday night is still the most up-to-date count available as of Wednesday afternoon.
The next update to the tally is scheduled to be posted on the county's website no later than 6 p.m. Wednesday, and it appears likely to be a large addition that could heavily impact the way the ranked choice tabulation process plays out.
The initial results Tuesday evening included just over 170,000 ballots in the race for mayor, but as of Wednesday afternoon the county's turnout dashboard page showed almost 327,000 ballots returned in Portland, indicating that there are upwards of 150,000 ballots still to be added to the tally either in Wednesday's update or in subsequent days.
Voters were asked to rank up to six candidates in order of preference for each Portland race. The ranked-choice tabulation process narrows down the field of candidates by eliminating the candidates with the fewest votes one by one and transferring their votes to whoever each voter ranked next-highest on their ballots.
When the county ran that process on the initial results Tuesday night, the mayoral race came down to Wilson and City Commissioner Carmen Rubio, with Wilson leading at 63% to Rubio's 37% and all other candidates eliminated.
But when the next batch of votes gets added on Wednesday, the county will re-run the tabulation process from scratch, meaning all of the eliminated candidates, such as Commissioners Rene Gonzalez and Mingus Mapps, will be back in contention. Depending on how voters filled out their ballots in the next batch, the order of elimination and the final candidates left standing could change when the tabulation is re-run.
Tabulation will be re-run after each new batch of votes is added, and the results won't become final until the process is run one more time after every vote has been counted — though some races may be called earlier if media outlets crunch the numbers and conclude that a candidate has amassed a large enough share of high-ranking votes to guarantee victory.
That's what happened Tuesday evening for city council candidates Steve Novick in District 3 and Olivia Clark in District 4. The council races will each produce three winners, and The Oregonian projected that Novick and Clark have opened up large enough leads to guarantee that they'll remain among the top three finishers once all ballots are counted.
The other two winners in those districts, along with all of the winners in Districts 1 and 2 and the mayoral race winner, all remained uncalled ahead of the release of Wednesday's updated results.
