A surplus of candidates can ruin any political campaign, and it's happened twice in recent groundbreaking elections in Cascadia. Fortunately, neighboring jurisdictions have demonstrated the solution to this problem: raise filing fees.

Alaska and Portland each recently debuted a new, much-anticipated ranked choice voting method. In both places, the trouble was that putting your name on the ballot was so easy (costing less than a tank of gas for a Ford F-150) that the elections were flooded with candidates.

The result, in both Alaska and Portland, was an inaugural campaign that tried voters' patience with teeming lists of candidates, many of them narcissistic dreamers with no intention of campaigning, no support from key constituencies, and no chance of winning.

One fix to this surplus is simple: charge candidates a filing fee large enough to dissuade dilettantes without deterring contenders. Montana, Alaska's closest cousin among the states, and Portland's urban counterparts in neighboring Washington charge filing fees more than ten times as high. That's why these Cascadian jurisdictions do not attract candidates like fishing derbies draw anglers.

Alaska's 2022 inaugural election was run under its top-four law. In top-four, voters choose four finalists in a primary election and then pick among them in a ranked choice voting general election. Voters for an open US House seat confronted a ballot overloaded with 48 candidates (pictured on the website). The state's new election plan was supposed to make things better; instead, voters got a ballot as daunting as The Cheesecake Factory's menu.

This race was a special election for the state's sole US House seat, unexpectedly vacated by the death of Rep. Don Young after 49 years in office. The absence of an incumbent and the novelty of the new rules recruited a bumper crop of candidates, and the nominal filing fee of just $100 did nothing to separate the chaff from the grain. For one Benjamin Franklin, you could get your name on every ballot and in every voters' guide in the state and - who knows? - maybe your candidacy would catch fire.

However, most did not catch even a spark, and few candidates raised money or ran actual campaigns. Just one-fifth of candidates cracked 2 percent of the vote. At the bottom of the pack, some 19 candidates won fewer than 100 votes each.

The same pattern emerged in Portland. The city 's 2024 election was the inaugural run of its new election system, which uses a single round of ranked choice voting for all races. Some 118 candidates surged into municipal contests. City Council Districts 3 and 4 each had 30 candidates for their three seats. (See sample ballots in the online version of this article.) Such races make voting a morass and campaigning a Black Friday crowd scene. At some debates, each candidate got speaking time measured in seconds.

In the end, as in Alaska, voters ignored most candidates. In District 4, for example, only 11 voters picked L Christopher Regis. He had enough support to field a kickball team in one of Portland's adult co-ed leagues but fell 11,251 votes short of winning a council seat. Regis was not alone. In Districts 3 and 4 combined, only a quarter of candidates crossed the 2 percent threshold. Most of the also-rans did not actually run. They just made the process of voting feel like scrolling through the dross on Netflix.

The sudden opening of every elected office in the city, all at the same time, brought the crush of candidates. Empty chairs attract aspirants. What's more, excitement about the new system itself drew participation, making more candidates believe they could compete. But the fact that securing a spot on the ballot cost nothing but $75 for council or $100 for mayor amplified the gold rush spirit.

Low filing fees for open seats elsewhere have also attracted swollen fields of candidates. In 2003, for example, a special election recalled the sitting governor of California, Gray Davis, and voters' plurality winne...