HB 2004 in Oregon’s House of Representatives could bring voters more voice and more choice.

Oregonians deserve the ability to vote for candidates that share their values and represent their communities, but the state’s current election system too often discourages voters from doing that. Almost every election comes with a discussion of “spoiler candidates,” voting for somebody who’s “more electable,” being sure not to “waste your vote,” or even “a vote for Candidate X is a vote for Candidate Y.” Voters are often wary of voting for a less popular candidate they might prefer, worrying that doing so may just help their least favorite major-party candidate win.

But a new bill sponsored by Speaker of the Oregon House Dan Rayfield, a Democrat representing Corvallis, could allay voters’ calculations about spoilers. HB 2004 would change elections for most statewide and federal positions to ranked choice voting, also called instant runoff voting. In both the party primaries and the general election, voters would rank candidates in order of preference instead of just selecting a single choice. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first preferences, ballots go to further rounds of counting where last-place candidates are eliminated and their voters’ later choices are considered, continuing until one candidate has over 50 percent of the vote among the remaining candidates.

The bill would also direct the Oregon Secretary of State’s office to provide guidance on implementation for jurisdictions adopting ranked choice voting for their local elections. This would ease some of the burden for cities and counties looking to follow in the path of Benton County, Corvallis, Portland, and Multnomah County.

Ranked choice voting beats Oregon’s current pick-one voting system on a few key measures, particularly in contests where voters have more than two candidates to choose from (as they do in almost every state election). Here are five reasons voters win out with the option to rank candidates on their ballots:

1. WINNERS EARN STRONGER BASES OF SUPPORT

Pick-one elections often work fine for elections with just two candidates in the running: voters select their favorite, and the person with more votes wins. But things get tricky when voters have three or more candidates to choose between. Maybe only 40 percent of voters cast their ballots for the winner, while two contending candidates each receive 30 percent. Or maybe there are ten candidates, and the winner comes out with support from only 15 or 20 percent of voters. When the top candidate has a plurality (the most votes) but not a majority (more than half of the votes), more voters voted against the winner than for them.

This happens all the time in Oregon. Of the seven gubernatorial elections since 2000, four saw the winning candidate finish with less than 50 percent of the vote. In 2022, with high-profile nonpartisan candidate Betsy Johnson drawing nine percent of the vote, Tina Kotek won the race for Governor with only 47 percent of voters supporting her.

It’s even worse in primary elections. Oregon’s Republican primaries for governor since 2000 usually saw nine or ten candidates, and in only one race did a winner receive a majority of the vote. 2022 was a particularly extreme example of this, with 19 candidates running; Christine Drazan came out on top but garnered only 23 percent of the vote. But say those other 77 percent of voters really didn’t like Drazan, and voters would have jointly preferred another candidate even if their first choice lost. Those 18 other candidates split the anti-Drazan vote, and the Drazan supporters, a small minority overall, got to pick their favorite, overriding the majority.

Ranked choice voting would help that majority coalesce around a single candidate, mitigating vote splitting among multiple similar options. Since Drazan wouldn’t be immediately elected in the first round of counting, later rounds might show that a stronger candidate had the suppo...