They’re more familiar than you might think.

Major changes may be coming to Portland City Hall soon, courtesy of the city-appointed volunteer Charter Commission and the will of Portlanders as expressed at the ballot box this fall. After two years of research and public input, Charter Commission members proposed ballot measure 26-228, an important change to Portland’s founding document that would improve the city’s form of government and elections.

Among other changes (which you can read about in our FAQ or the City’s), ballot measure 26-228 would introduce multi-member districts. The city would be portioned into four equally populated geographic regions that each elect three city councilors. Here are ten things you should know about multi-member districts before you vote on the charter proposal.

1. YOU’RE ALREADY USING THEM

You heard me right: every Portlander is already living in a multi-member district system. Portland’s four city commissioners are elected in a multi-member district that encompasses the whole city. In the US Senate, there are 50 districts (states), each represented by two senators. And until 1972, Oregon itself used multi-member districts to elect its state legislature. Less populous counties were combined until enough people were included to warrant a single House or Senate seat, and larger counties elected multiple legislators to represent the entire county. Multi-member districts are also used in Anchorage, Alaska; Spokane, Washington; the Washington state House of Representatives; and many other places around the world.

2. THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT WAYS TO ELECT THE MEMBERS

Election systems require a ton of decisions, and different places often make different combinations of those decisions. If voters approve measure 26-228, Portland’s four districts of three councilors each would use a multi-winner ranked choice voting system. Cambridge, Massachusetts, also uses multi-winner ranked choice voting to elect its citywide council. In Portland’s current city commissioner system, the US Senate, and the old Oregon legislative system, candidates run for numbered positions and voters choose a single representative for each seat (single-winner races). Next door in Lake Oswego, voters select three candidates from a single pool on their ballot, and the top three vote-getters are elected to the citywide council. Similar systems, called “bloc voting,“ are used in more than 100 other Oregon cities.

3. SOME WAYS HAVE BEEN USED TO EXCLUDE SMALLER VOTER BLOCS.

The different methods of electing multiple representatives all have pros and cons. Single-winner races and bloc voting are both winner-take-all systems. Portland currently uses a citywide winner-take-all system, meaning that a group of voters that makes up 50 percent (plus one) of the vote can elect all four commissioners and the mayor. Winner-take-all systems like this can lock any smaller group of voters out of winning any representation, whether used in at-large, single-member district, or multi-member district systems.

For example, before the Civil Rights Movement, some Southern states used winner-take-all multi-member districts to prevent Black voters from electing their preferred candidates to the US House of Representatives. In states that elected their House delegations as one big multi-member district, white majorities were able to win every single seat and leave Black voters without representation. In an attempt to remedy this, Congress banned all types of multi-member districts for the US House of Representatives in 1967. This successfully prevented states from using statewide winner-take-all systems to elect all of their representatives, but it also blocked states from using the much more democratic proportional system that Portland has the chance to implement this November.

4. .WHILE OTHERS ARE GLOBAL BEST PRACTICES IN DEMOCRACY

Proportional representation systems stand in stark contrast to winner-take-all systems and are the most common type of electi...