The city shouldn’t require parking that never gets used.

Anchorage needs parking. The city was built around cars and so almost everyone uses them, whether they want to or not. Naturally we need a place to put them. But who should have the power to decide how much parking Anchorage’s homes and businesses need?

It’s a question that’s come up in cities and states across the US. City zoning codes tend to dictate how many parking spaces, say, a retailer or homebuilder needs to pave. The problem is that cities frequently overestimate how much parking a site actually needs. And so, city after city, and the entire state of California, have decided to return that power to the people on the ground who have a much clearer idea of parking needs for the properties they own, projects they’re developing, or businesses they run.

Anchorage could do the same. Like other cities across America, Anchorage has erred on building more parking than necessary. In every neighborhood except downtown, Anchorage code has highly specific (but not scientific) rules dictating the minimum number of parking spots required for over 100 business and housing types, from dry cleaners to bingo parlors to triplexes.

A study conducted by the city in the late 2000s found a chronic oversupply of parking on multifamily and commercial properties across Anchorage, with 1 in 4 city-mandated parking spaces sitting empty at peak periods. Of the 35 sites listed, 31 of them never used all the parking required under the land use code, commonly referred to as “Title 21.”

“Well,” you might think, “that seems fine. Hunting for parking is painful. The more parking the better!”

Sure, an undersupply of parking spaces isn’t fun when you’re circling a lot. But an oversupply has insidious and less obvious downsides. Forcing businesses to provide more parking than they need costs them (and, by extension, you) thousands of dollars per stall. That’s why even Walmart is asking cities for permission to build less parking as more of its sales go online. And requiring extra spots that rarely, if ever, get used makes new housing much harder to design, more expensive to build, and pricier to rent or own. In the worst cases, government mandates to build excess parking snuff out new growth completely.

In Midtown, a local dentist finds parking rules bite

Take the case of Anchorage dentist Guy Burk. In 2020, Burk received a letter from the city warning him he’d be fined $300 per day for lack of parking at his Midtown office. Burk was stunned. He has more than 50 parking spaces to accommodate the 20 or so employees and patients who are in his office at peak times. In fact, he has so much parking that he lets visitors to the neighboring strip mall use the extra spots.

“Parking capacity is a problem that should be on the business owners to solve,”

Burk said.

“If there’s not enough parking, my patients will say, ‘There’s not enough, and I’m going to go to another dental office.’ Why is the city getting involved at all?”

The city asked Burk to submit a parking agreement showing that Burk and the owners of the lot he leases would provide parking in perpetuity.

“Nobody’s going to do that,”

Burk said.

“No one’s going to lock up their land like that.”

To avoid the fine, Burk bought three vacant parcels another block away, in case the city made him build more parking. He estimates that paving the parcels would cost nearly $200,000. In the meantime, he’s been working with the city on a possible temporary shared parking agreement and a parking use study.

Burk would prefer to put his money and time toward two businesses---a dental milling and printing center and an industrial ATV retailer---that he’s planning for the building next door. But there again he will need another shared parking agreement, since zoning code requires about five times the number of spots Burk calculates he’ll need. Because of the parking issue, he’s put the renovation on hold.

In Burk’s view, minimum parking requirements are the biggest...

Where ballot measure 26-228's reforms stand, less than two months from Election Day.

With six weeks until the November 8 Election Day, Portlanders are gearing up to vote on a ballot measure that would transform the city’s system of government and elections so that they better serve and represent the people of Portland. Since Sightline’s last update on the effort to change Portland’s city charter, campaigns have geared up both for and against the measure, and news has proliferated around lawsuits, alternative reform proposals, and opposition figures. Below we review what the measure contains and the last few months’ developments you may have missed as you were enjoying your summer.

What would ballot measure 26-228 deliver?

Portland voters will have to look well down their ballots this fall, past numerous other races for federal, state, and local offices to find any local ballot measures. But when they do, they’ll see this question: “Should Administrator manage city government, 12-member Council (three from each district) make laws, voters elect officials using ranked choice process?” This is measure 26-228, an opportunity to change the city’s charter in three key ways:

1. CITY DEPARTMENTS RUN BY A MAYOR-APPOINTED PROFESSIONAL ADMINISTRATOR, NOT CITY COUNCILORS

City Council would become a true legislative body instead of mixing council work with the daily duties of running city departments. This would let councilors focus on making laws, connecting with residents, and addressing constituents’ concerns. Most importantly, councilors would no longer directly supervise individual government bureaus’ day-to-day operations.

Portland’s current system is kind of like if your US Representative was also in charge of running the IRS every day, taking away time from their work passing bills and responding to people in their district. Portland is the only large American city that uses this style of government (called the “commission form”), and critics decry it for a lack of efficiency, accountability, transparency, and cooperation. In place of individual commissioners running different departments, the mayor would supervise a professional city administrator (confirmed by City Council) to run the bureaus.

2. A BIGGER COUNCIL TO SERVE THE GROWING PORTLAND POPULATION, IN 4 GEOGRAPHIC DISTRICTS

Each councilor would represent one of four geographic districts, and each district would elect three councilors. This would create a 12-member City Council, a figure that expands the council to better match Portland’s current population and updates it from the mere five councilors (including the mayor) it has comprised since 1913.

This means not only more points of access for Portlanders to voice their needs to the city, but also better representation for constituencies historically excluded from council: women, people of color, renters, young people, residents of East Portland, and working-class Portlanders. For instance, since 1995, three-quarters of councilors have been white men and less than four percent have been people of color, even while over a quarter of Portlanders in that period were people of color. Multi-member districts and a larger council overall, like those proposed in measure 26-228, will help these groups gain a greater voice on council. And councilors would maintain an office in their district, meaning that residents could go to any of their three councilors at a more local city office for certain business instead of having to travel downtown.

3. ELECTIONS THAT INCLUDE MORE VOTERS AND HONOR THEIR TRUE PREFERENCES

Finally, all elected officials would be chosen using ranked choice voting. Voters would rank candidates in order of their preference, then votes would be counted in rounds, with last-place candidates eliminated until a winner receives more than 50 percent of the votes. After the first round of counting, voters’ later choices are counted if their top candidate is eliminated.

The mayor and auditor would each be elected unde...

Housing growth drops 20 percent, on average, in cities making the sort of switch proposed by Portland’s Commissioner Mapps.

A new 11th-hour idea for rewriting the rules of Portland’s city government has several possible flaws, but here’s one: statistically speaking, it’d be likely to worsen the city’s housing shortage.

The proposal was publicly floated in a media interview three weeks ago by its loudest advocate, city Commissioner Mingus Mapps. Mapps’s idea, according to The Oregonian/OregonLive: to scrap the concept hammered out by a city-appointed citizen commission over the last year, a form of proportional representation, in favor of a winner-take-all system that would elect its entire council from smaller, one-winner districts.

A referendum that would implement proportional representation and other changes is on the November ballot in Cascadia’s third-largest city as measure 26-228. Mapps’s concept has yet to be fully hammered out and might yet change.

If Mapps’s proposal ends up as described by The Oregonian and wins support from other councilors and the public, Portland would be imitating a form of government that reduces housing growth in US cities by an average of 20 percent.

“The number of units permitted falls sharply . . . immediately upon the reform’s approval,”

wrote Evan Mast, the author of an academic paper on this subject circulated in 2020 and published in May, “Warding Off Development: Local Control, Housing Supply, and NIMBYs.”

ONE PORTLAND CITY COUNCILOR SAYS HE WANTS A COUNCIL ELECTED FROM SINGLE-WINNER WARDS

Here’s the current political situation in Portland: In late 2020, its city council named 20 people to research and propose changes to Portland’s charter—essentially its city constitution. This summer (2022), after much testimony and debate, those 20 people (the Charter Commission) proposed some changes to how the city’s government operates and how voters elect its officials. By a 17–3 vote, they sent this package directly to Portland voters’ November ballots, bypassing any edits from City Council.

The new election system they proposed was modeled on a system that’s common around the world: proportional representation. It would divide the city into four relatively large districts, each of which would use multi-winner ranked choice voting to elect three commissioners in rough proportion to the various political opinions and interests that make up each district. If more than one-quarter of a district ranks a candidate highly, that candidate earns one of the three seats in that district.

During an informational presentation from the Charter Commission, three city council members announced that though they liked the proposed changes to how the city is run, they had concerns about that sort of election system. Then, on Aug. 30, one of those council members, Mingus Mapps, announced that if November’s ballot measure fails, he expects to propose his own, different election system, one more familiar to many Americans: eight smaller districts that would each elect just one person.

It’s that system—a council made up entirely of “winner-take-all” wards—that a growing body of research says tends to lead to fewer homes being built.

ONE-WINNER WARD SYSTEMS SEEM TO CAUSE HOUSING SLOWDOWNS

One recent academic paper with this finding is from Evan Mast, a housing economist at the University of Notre Dame. He looked at housing growth rates in 238 cities that recently made the sort of switch that Mapps is suddenly advocating for in Portland: from at-large to district elections. It turned out that these cities generally saw a sharp dip in new construction immediately after their change. Then, after about two years, they tended to rebound somewhat to a new, lower equilibrium of housing production. Cities that switched to single-winner districts settled at about 20 percent fewer new permitted units per resident than cities that continued using at-large elections.

Another relevant paper is by two political scientists. Mich...

Public investment is the key to sustainable forestry.

Where timber plantations were once logged intensively on short rotations, older and more complex forests now stand on the 9,400 acres owned by the van Eck Forest Foundation in Oregon and California. The new practices store more carbon and offer ideal stream conditions for salmon as well as habitat for marbled murrelets and northern spotted owls. Legal agreements called working forest conservation easements (WFCEs) protect these forests from conversion to agriculture or development, and the van Eck easements include prescriptions that also guarantee improved forest management, including growing older trees, into the future.

In defiance of the false jobs-versus-environment dichotomy, these forests produce millions of board feet of timber each year, supporting loggers, truck drivers, mill workers, foresters, and biologists. Selling carbon credits from its California forests adds another income stream for the Van Eck Forest Foundation.

The practice of “long rotations” means growing trees longer before logging them. It extends the length of a harvest cycle from a short “financial rotation age” that maximizes net present value to a longer “biological rotation age” that maximizes timber production as well as carbon storage, habitat, and water quality.

Economists call the ecological harm of intensive short-rotation logging a market failure. That is, when the environmental benefits are accounted for, long rotations increase the wealth of society as a whole by more than enough to pay landowners to delay harvest. Of course, though, without countervailing action, such payment does not occur.

Meanwhile, timber companies do not have to pay the environmental costs of short rotations. These are often unseen “environmental externalities.” And long rotations’ ecological benefits, because they are public goods that everyone can enjoy whether or not they cut a check to the landowners and investors, suffer from a lack of adequate voluntary funding: the free rider problem. This means that timberland owners, for whom delaying harvest comes at a steep cost, can’t get paid for their work of stewarding these trees through long rotations. It’s a cycle that cheats the foresters, society, and the environment.

In ballpark figures, fixing the short-rotation market failure on the 8 million acres of private industrial forest in western Oregon and Washington would cost around $16 billion.1 That sounds steep, until one learns that it would generate around $40 billion in carbon storage benefits alone.2 That is over 100 percent return on investment.

Is there a way to fix this market failure? Economists have traditionally recommended two kinds of solutions: regulate companies or privatize benefits. Starting with the second option, Sightline examined seven existing mechanisms that Cascadians could use to pay landowners what it costs them to grow older forests, incentivizing those landowners to do so while also supporting the ecological benefits regional residents and people around the globe so appreciate about their forestlands. While we did not perform a robust quantitative analysis that accounts for feedback and equilibrium effects, we did examine the current size and shape of these mechanisms and we compared them with both the carbon storage benefits of long rotations and their costs to landowners.

Because forest health and carbon storage are public goods that are vulnerable to free-riding, voluntary mechanisms alone—carbon markets, sustainable sourcing, sustainability certifications, and impact investing—cannot meet the scale needed to fix the short-rotation market failure. (In other words, these voluntary markets also suffer from market failure.)

But two existing and time-tested US federal programs could. The Forest Legacy Program (FLP) and the Healthy Forest Reserve Program (HFRP) could pay landowners for long rotations at the scale needed to fix the short rotation market failure. FLP appears to be more...

Either one would likely launch in August 2025.

Proponents of approval voting claim it is much faster to implement than ranked choice voting. For example, Seattle Approves, which sponsored the approval voting (AV) measure on the November ballot in the city, writes: "In Seattle, Approval Voting could be adopted in November 2022 and potentially could be used in the 2023 primary election. RCV [ranked choice voting] would have a difficult and long road to adoption because it would require changes to the law and voting software.”

Is this true? Not really.

In Seattle, any new voting system adopted in November 2022, whether AV or RCV, will almost certainly not be ready for the city’s August 2023 primary election nine months later.

The real question is whether it will be ready within two years and nine months, for the August 2025 primary election, or within four years and nine months, for the August 2027 primary. The balance of evidence suggests that either system would launch in August 2025.

AV: Simpler but not faster

AV proponents are not wrong: AV is simpler to administer than RCV, which should make it faster to launch. It requires smaller changes to ballots than RCV. Julie Wise, elections director for King County, which encompasses Seattle, told Sightline, “Approval voting would be pretty familiar to our voters---the instructions would change but the overall ballot wouldn’t need to change.” Likewise, AV would require much smaller changes to ballot counting software than RCV.

But that simplicity would not advance the launch date to August 2023 from August 2025, which is the deadline written into the ballot measure for AV. It’d be faster, but not fast enough to matter.

Under state and local law and policy, all new and upgraded voting systems (including ballot designs combined with vote-counting hardware and software) require 1) certification in one of a handful of federally accredited testing laboratories, 2) testing by the state, 3) authorization by the secretary of state in Olympia, and 4) a final set of tests and audits at the local level. Completing these steps in nine months would be next to impossible.

King County uses ballot counting software from a company called Clear Ballot, and Clear Ballot does not have software systems ready and certified for RCV or AV. Seattle Approves leader Troy Davis told Sightline that King County is already authorized to use its existing Clear Ballot systems to tabulate approval votes, but Elections Director Wise disagrees. She says it’s unclear what certification and authorization AV would need.

One key line of state law, for example, says that any change in any voting system that “extend(s) its function” requires reapproval by the secretary of state. A wholesale change to approval voting sure seems like it “extends the function” of Clear Ballot’s system. Clear Ballot would therefore probably need to run the full gauntlet of certification and authorization before tallying AV votes. That process alone might take a year, as noted below. The final word in how to interpret state law, of course, is neither Julie Wise’s, nor Troy Davis’s, nor mine. It would have to come from the secretary of state or the courts, but even getting an answer would take time, slowing implementation.

King County is meticulous (and unhurried) in its election administration

Even without a full certification gauntlet, though, AV is unlikely to be ready by August 2023. Julie Wise and the staff of King County Elections treat ballot design and voter education with admirable seriousness. Seattle has twice as many voters as St. Louis and six times as many as Fargo, other places that have implemented AV. King County Elections is a national leader in election administration, and it tests, tests, and tests again its innovations before launching them: user testing, focus groups, real-world simulations, and more. Asked when she thought she could launch AV or RCV, Julie Wise demurred, citing the many unknowns. Then she told Sightline:

...

Did the state's first ranked choice voting election deliver on its promises?

Mary Peltola is going to the US House. The former state House member will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress after winning the state’s first ranked choice election on Wednesday. Peltola will serve out the remainder of the term of former Representative Don Young, who passed away in March.

Peltola maintained her lead in Round 1 to beat out Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich with a final total of 91,206 votes, or a little over 51 percent. After Begich was eliminated in the first round of ranked-choice tabulations, the second-place votes on his voters’ ballots were redistributed. But they weren’t enough to grant victory to Palin, a former Alaska governor, vice presidential nominee, and far-right political celebrity. She captured 49 percent of the final vote. Alaska Division of Elections director Gail Fenumiai announced the results on a Facebook livestream.

Did Alaska’s new election system work as predicted?

Before the election reforms passed in November 2020, I wrote, “No voting system is absolutely perfect, but . ranked choice voting is better than the more prevalent winner-takes-all system at strengthening democracy.” After they passed, I called it a “cure for US elections.”

In ranked choice voting, voters rank candidates from most- to least-favorite. In Round 1, any candidate who wins a majority of first-place votes wins. If no one secures a majority, the last-place candidate leaves the race and a new round begins. In Round 2, the second-place votes from the ballots of the candidate defeated in Round 1 get redistributed among the remaining candidates. The process continues until a candidate secures a majority of the voted ballots.

I wrote that Alaska’s new system would likely have the following benefits: making campaigns less polarized and, possibly, more civil than the status quo; being easy for voters to understand; checking the power of political parties and hyperpartisan primary voters; leveling the playing field for candidates from underrepresented groups; improving voter turnout; and ensuring no candidate can win without a majority in the final round.

Alaskan voters adopted ranked choice general elections, along with open primary elections, in November 2020. Many supported the reforms based on these anticipated benefits. And while the US House special election only gives us a single Alaska data point when it comes to ranked choice voting, it’s worth examining whether the new system delivered.

Campaigns may become more civil and less polarized

The apocalyptic tropes of left vs. right that so often characterize US elections didn’t dominate this one. Peltola radiated warmth throughout the campaign. She snapped selfies with her Republican opponents, spoke of her support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and shared laughs with Palin over their time as pregnant politico moms working in Juneau. (Peltola served in the state House while Palin was governor.) Palin even called her a “sweetheart.”

But civility did not exactly rule the day. With only one Republican expected to survive Round 1, the two conservatives turned on each other. Begich ran ads calling out Palin for leaving the governorship before her term ended to chase fame and fortune outside Alaska. Palin questioned Begich’s credentials as an Alaskan, threw shade on his relative lack of political experience, and cast doubt on his fealty to the Republican cause. (Begich did say he’d rank Palin second, but the ads spoke for themselves.) It didn’t have to go that way. A different set of Republican candidates may well have worked together to drum up votes for each other.

Peltola’s victory meant the least polarizing candidate actually won. Peltola is a moderate Democrat. Like Sen. Lisa Murkowski, she supports abortion rights and cares deeply about the welfare of indigenous people and the health of the salmon runs across the state. She will also defend the oil ...

A design competition identified the key barriers to expanding great multifamily options in Alaska’s largest city.

There’s not much consumer choice in the Anchorage housing market. Single-detached homes, or “one-plexes,” are the norm, even though residents want more options to accommodate their different life stages and budgets. So, some of Alaska’s top architects and builders teamed up with Fairview residents in a neighborhood design contest to imagine a future inspired by historic housing norms, when cities allowed a wider array of homes in American neighborhoods.

In the Fairview design contest, teams proposed plans for a hypothetical triplex on a real-life vacant lot. The entries included:

a coworking residence for remote workers looking to split housing costs with roommates;

a duplex-plus-backyard-cottage option perfect for multigenerational families;

a modern triplex that could work for people who aren’t into paying for a suburban house (not to mention lawncare); and

underground apartments that might attract avid gardeners and avant-garde urbanites.

Unfortunately, Anchorage city code, as written, makes every one of these designs either impossible or much harder to build than a single-detached house. A thicket of zoning rules, including parking requirements, setbacks, and onerous site preparation for triplexes, ensures that inefficient land use will continue in Anchorage for the foreseeable future. But changes may come soon. The contest helped spur the city to reconsider some of the zoning regulations that impede triplex construction, skew the market, and squash innovation.

A HOUSING REFRESH ON A FAIRVIEW LOT

Cook Inlet Housing Authority (CIHA, pronounced “see-ha”) stands out among the many groups working to make Anchorage’s housing stock more appealing to a broader group of renters and homebuyers. In 2019 CIHA partnered with the Fairview Community Council to sponsor a triplex design contest—a contest that ended up highlighting the biggest regulatory obstacles to expanding home choices. Local planning officials have since used these insights to move toward modest reforms to parking rules and other parts of the Anchorage land use code.

The contest, dubbed COMP/act, was a community endeavor. (The name is a play on “competition” and the need for “action” that will allow construction of more compact housing styles.) The Rasmuson Foundation provided a grant to run COMP/act and award cash prizes. The Anchorage Museum featured the contest at an event in its SEED Lab. And the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation’s Live.Work.Play. committee helped to promote the contest.

Four teams made the finals. Each consisted of a designer, a builder, and a neighborhood resident, with a vacant property in Fairview serving as the blank slate for their designs. The rectangular, 7,000-square-foot lot at 820 Nelchina Street is covered in vegetation and sits between a blue ranch house and a fourplex. The property is remarkable not for what it is but for what it represents: a way to envision how Anchorage might modernize the city’s housing stock, meet consumer appetites for more price points and housing styles, and use land more efficiently while preserving the intimate scale of the neighborhood.

Historically, Fairview was one of only a few Anchorage neighborhoods where Alaska Natives and Blacks could own land. White neighborhoods, including Turnagain and Rogers Park, put in place racial covenants barring the sale of homes to non-whites. Following the exclusionary tactics used by Berkeley, California, and countless other American cities throughout the twentieth century, Anchorage created socioeconomic walls around desirable neighborhoods through zoning laws that made building more than one unit per lot relatively difficult.

Today, the covenants are illegal, but the zoning laws live on. Rules like lot size and square footage minimums have made the real estate market less affordable over time and helped create the housing shortage we see in Anc...

It’s a novice system when it comes to real-world elections, where ranked choice voting is a battle-tested pro.

Seattle voters will decide in November whether to adopt approval voting, ranked choice voting, or no change to their primary election ballots. What do the research literature and practical experience say about these two alternatives to pick-one voting? They say a tremendous amount about ranked choice voting (RCV), and Sightline has summarized the lessons in tens of thousands of mostly encouraging words over years. But they say much less about approval voting (AV). This article summarizes what’s known.

Approval voting has intriguing features. It is simple to implement and easy to tabulate. Its proponents plausibly claim worthy benefits, including more moderate victors and less negative campaigning. It is worth experimenting with and deserving of study. We stand to learn more over time because two communities have recently adopted it. They are, in effect, conducting the clinical trials for this new voting method.

Both intuition and theory say AV will elect people who are, if not necessarily voters’ favorites, at least unobjectionable to most. They would be “consensus-style candidates,” say AV proponents. That tendency to dampen extremism and reward competent, cooperative governance, I surmise, is a major appeal of AV for its proponents and financiers, and it’s a goal Sightline shares.

But adopting AV for primary elections for all city offices in Cascadia’s largest city would be risky. For all its appeal, AV is a novel, unproven, and legally untested system for elections, and it has weaknesses that should give us pause.

The most salient fact about approval voting is that we do not actually know much about how it operates in the real world, not just in simulations or in academic papers or in the minds of schemers on Twitter or Reddit but in the pressure cooker of actual government elections, where campaigns rage, TV ads promise and malign, tempers flare, and hopes soar. This is where voters face the unavoidable dilemma into which AV forces them—that is, between helping their favorite and guarding against their least favorite.

We do not know if AV will deliver what it promises (moderation and a dampening of extremes), but we have reasons for doubt. We do not know if AV will lead to fair representation or pass court muster, but we have cause for caution. For these reasons, adopting it in Seattle in November would be risky, especially when Seattle can adopt the well vetted and helpful alternative of ranked choice voting instead. Let’s take a closer look at why.

1. APPROVAL VOTING IS TOO BASIC TO REPRESENT A VOTER’S PREFERENCES

Let’s start with the voter’s experience.

For voters, approval voting, like ranked choice voting, is an alternative to old-fashioned, pick-one voting. In it, you can fill in the bubbles next to as many candidates as you like. Whichever candidate gets the most approval votes wins.

It seems simple, and simplicity is appealing. AV is easy to understand and easy to tabulate. Unfortunately, its simplicity also holds weakness. Indeed, simplicity can make approval voting frustrating for voters.

The defining feature of approval voting is that it’s binary: approve or not, bubble filled or blank, yes or no. You approve just your favorite. Or your favorite and your second favorite. Or your top three. Or any number you choose. It’s up to you. Simple.

What you cannot do is convey any other preferences. No rankings. No ratings. No way to say that you love Nader but would settle for Gore, that you’d really like Perot but could live with Bush Sr., that you’d be elated with Biden, could get excited about Klobuchar, would be satisfied with Booker, and could tolerate Mayor Pete.

If your preferences are black and white, with no shades of gray, AV may be for you. Otherwise, the more you think about it, the more confounding it becomes. If you actually care who you vote for, you have no good option. Approve Elizabeth Warre...

In a setback for county residents and democracy reforms sprouting up across Cascadia, Councilors claimed without explanation that the amendments did not comply with provisions of the Charter.

Nine months ago, the 18 residents elected to San Juan County, Washington’s, Charter Review Commission proposed 4 amendments to the County Charter, including one to implement ranked choice voting. On Tuesday evening, just after the deadline to refer these amendments to the voters, the County Council voted 3–0 not to place the amendments on this November’s ballot for residents to vote on. After returning from a portion of their meeting that was not available to the public, San Juan County’s three Councilors said that the amendments “[do] not conform with the procedural requirements of the San Juan County Charter” but neglected to explain their decision any further.

An initial reading of the San Juan County Charter seems to indicate that the Council’s actions themselves are in violation of the Charter, which requires that “the County Council shall submit the amendment[s] to the voters at the next November general election.” This was not simply an error of omission. Not only did the Councilors fail to forward the amendments to the ballot as required by the Charter, but they explicitly made a motion stating that they would not submit the amendments to the County Auditor, the elections official that would put these measures on the ballot.

Both the timing and scant reasoning behind this choice do no favors for county residents (including Charter Review Commissioners) displeased with the decision. Since the Council waited until after the last minute to rebuff the charter amendments, some procedural paths to placing them before the voters in November are closed off. Even if the County Council later changed its decision or the courts ruled against it, there’s no guarantee that election administrators would receive the amendments in time to include them on the ballot. Councilors also omitted crucial details that could help residents understand their decision, like whether they found any specific amendments to be out of compliance, what part of the charter review process led to the alleged procedural problem, and which provisions of the charter they claimed were being violated.

[Author added this paragraph 8/9/22]

While the Council provided no public explanation of its decision, the Journal of the San Juan Islands reported that the Council’s grievance may have been that the Charter Review Commission referred these four measures after previously referring six other measures. The local paper noted that the county’s Prosecuting Attorney originally told the Commission it could refer two sets of amendments but later advised against that option. The relevant portion of the County Charter states that the Commission’s term of service ends after one year or “when final recommendations are submitted” for the ballot, whichever comes first. If this reasoning holds up, the question is whether the Commission’s first set of amendments counted as submitting “final recommendations.”

Every decade, San Juan County voters elect 18 residents to a Charter Review Commission to review the County Charter and propose amendments. The Commissioners elected in 2020 proposed six amendments for the November 2021 election, plus the aforementioned four amendments for the November 2022 election. The 2022 proposed amendments would:

Establish a new position of Public Advocate for the county;

Clarify the funding, support, and authority of future Charter Review Commissions;

Implement ranked choice voting for county elected positions; and

Lower the required number of signatures for initiative and referendum petitions.

Several other jurisdictions throughout Cascadia are set to vote on adopting ranked choice voting this November. Portland, Oregon; Multnomah County, Oregon; and Clark County, Washington, all proposed it through charter commissions, and the Seattle City Council placed it on...

Pandering to the center is actually a viable strategy in the race to serve out Rep. Don Young's term in the US House.

For a country bogged down by political polarization, the run-up to Alaska’s first ranked choice election might seem refreshing: a Democrat talking openly about family ties to a Republican Congressman; a Republican giving shout-outs to union members; and voters with the power to rank candidates from the opposing party.

In Alaska’s special election to serve out the term of late US House Representative Don Young, cross-party outreach has clear benefits for both voters and candidates. The upsides of weighing both sides may not exist in every ranked choice election, but they do in this one. The two Republicans and one Democrat in the race all have paths to victory made all the more viable by courting voters from both parties. And voters have the opportunity to rank all three candidates, meaning they shouldn’t immediately write off candidates from the opposing side.

Candidate and voter behavior in Alaska so far bolsters the theory that ranked choice voting, at least in certain elections, can to some degree counter polarization. If applied more widely, could ranked choice voting be part of a cure for hyper partisanship? If so, more moderate cohorts of lawmakers might make more progress on issues voters care about, like reducing the high cost of health care and improving educational opportunities.

This article looks at the following: Where is there room for bipartisan behavior in Alaska’s special general election for US House? Does it actually make sense for voters? How are Republicans Nick Begich and Sarah Palin, and Democrat Mary Peltola courting voters from the other side? And what could it all imply for American democracy?

For Democratic voters, ranking a Republican second isn’t a terrible idea

In ranked choice voting, voters rank candidates from most- to least-favorite. In Round 1, the candidate with the most first-place votes wins. If no one wins outright by securing a majority of first-place votes, the last-place candidate exits the race and a new round begins. In Round 2, the second-place votes from the ballots of the candidate defeated in Round 1 get redistributed among the remaining candidates. The process continues until a candidate secures a majority of the votes.

A ranked ballot affords voters more power to influence the results than they would in the typical American election, where each voter chooses just one candidate and the candidate with the most votes wins. The option to rank expands voting power. Even if your favorite candidate loses, your next-favorite candidate can get your vote.

And yet, some Alaska progressives are talking about voting for the lone Democrat only and not ranking either of the two Republicans. Viewed one way, that strategy makes sense, at least for the House special election.

Here’s why: The Democrat, Peltola, likely will secure about 40 percent of first round votes, enough to send her to Round 2. The two Republican candidates, Begich and Palin, will split the remaining 60 percent. That means either Begich or Palin will leave the field in Round 1. The other will advance with Peltola to Round 2.

Here’s where ranked choice voting kicks in. The voters who chose the Round 1 loser as their No. 1 and ranked another candidate second will remain in the game. In fact, their second-choice votes will decide the election. In this scenario, where Peltola advances to Round 2, her supporters’ second choices won’t matter. With three candidates in the race, the election will end in Round 2.

But if Peltola somehow loses in the first round, those of her supporters who failed to rank a second candidate will have forfeited a plum chance to influence the election. Ranking Peltola first and a Republican second would NOT allow the Republican to beat Peltola as long as she’s still in the race.

Again, Peltola supporters lose nothing by ranking a Republican second. But if she’s out in Round 1, they’ll h...