Proportional ranked choice voting lived up to the promises of the voter-approved charter reform.

Well, it's working!

Portlanders just used proportional ranked choice voting to elect their most representative city government in more than a century. Voters chose leaders who form a portrait of the city in miniature. The dozen councilors include three renters, five people of color, six women, eight millennials (one only 28 years old), and residents of twelve different neighborhoods. Most importantly, proportional representation paved the way for a council that reflects Portlanders' varied political beliefs, full of advocates for different viewpoints from business to labor, from moderates to progressives, and even from animal rights to transportation safety.

After years of thoughtful proposals, discussions, committees, and implementation, Portland got its first real-world look at a system that will hopefully serve the city well for generations. The upgraded council will govern alongside a new mayor who promised to be laser-focused on ending unsheltered homelessness, aided by a streamlined set of departments working in tandem under a professional city administrator. The next step? Getting to work on the city's most pressing problems.

A remarkably smooth and transparent election

Critics feared that ranked choice voting would be too complicated and onerous for administrators to manage. They projected chaos and raised alarms about undecipherable algorithms.

Nope.

The officials at Multnomah County Elections pulled off the implementation without a hitch, after only two years to prepare. Commentators from Multnomah County itself to the Oregonian called the election remarkably smooth and transparent. The elections office released preliminary results every few days during the ballot counting process as planned. Media outlets were able to call some winners based on large vote shares on election night, then confirm other seats within a few days. The closest races still depend on the last sets of ballots to arrive, just like under the old election system. And election officials are on track to finalize results before the legal certification deadline.

The biggest surprise from the tabulation was not its controversy but its consistency. Mayor-elect Keith Wilson started ahead in the first round of counting, with 34 percent of first-choice votes. No other candidate had more than 23 percent. Wilson stayed ahead until he gained a majority in the 19th round of counting.

Similarly, the top three candidates in the first round won council seats in all but one district. In the remaining District 4, which includes every voter west of the Willamette River and some Southeast neighborhoods, Eric Zimmerman started in fourth place, 112 votes behind initial third-place candidate Eli Arnold. But Zimmerman overtook Arnold in later rounds. In all the races, results remained mostly unchanged all week, as election workers counted additional ballots.

Multiple rounds of tabulation didn't substantially change the orderings of candidates, but ranked choice voting still had major impacts on this election. Vote transfers confirmed that a majority of voters supported Keith Wilson for mayor in the final round, a significant increase from the first round when he only received one-third of first-choice votes. In council races, candidates who passed the 25 percent threshold in later rounds started with as low as 10 percent of first-choice votes in a crowded field. Moreover, since ranked choice voting is better at avoiding spoilers in multi-candidate fields than the old pick-one method, Portland was able to eliminate the primary election, and voter turnout nearly doubled compared with the low-turnout primary elections that used to elect most city commissioners.

Mayor-elect Wilson might not have survived the prior system: the outsider eco-trucking CEO likely would have been eliminated in the former May primary in favor of two sitting commissioners, who were more familiar (and...