City Councilor Burhan Azeem shares his experiences from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Thanks to the charter change ballot measure voters approved in November 2022, Portlanders will see a few changes to the city’s election method and governance in the coming years. One of the first will be the November 2024 election, when voters will choose 12 councilors in 4 districts using proportional ranked choice voting.

Under the new system, Portlanders will be able to rank multiple candidates on their ballot, bubbling in their first choice, second choice, and so on. Instead of a single candidate winning one seat with more than 50 percent of the vote, 3 candidates in each district will win seats with more than 25 percent of the vote each. Ballots are counted in rounds until these 3 candidates come out on top. Losing candidates in each round are eliminated, and their votes are transferred to the voters’ next-choice candidates. Candidates who pass that 25 percent threshold during counting will win a seat, and any votes above that threshold will be transferred to the voters’ next-choice candidates.

To get some ideas about what voters can expect from the new system, I talked to Cambridge, Massachusetts, City Councilor Burhan Azeem. Azeem is serving his first term on the council and is the youngest councilor in the history of Cambridge, home to the United States’ longest-running proportional election system. Since 1941, Cambridge voters have selected nine citywide councilors using proportional ranked choice voting. While Portland’s experience won’t look exactly the same as Cambridge’s, Rose City residents can learn a lot from the practices and results they’ve had over the last 80 years. Here are excerpts, edited for brevity and clarity, from my conversation with Councilor Azeem.

Why did you run for office?

There’s all sorts of political causes and stuff I really care a lot about: housing and transportation policy, as well as other things. But my first real call was showing up to City Hall and thinking, “This is not the city I see right outside the doors.” Cambridge is a very young city, even without counting kids. And especially when I first got involved in politics, everyone was fairly old.

Besides our mayor, all my other colleagues currently on the city council are between 50 and 80. They’re all great people, but it was just very different than the city that was represented. Some of my main issues as a candidate were topics related to the universities we have in town, and I ended up getting lots of votes in areas where lots of students live. So I think the message you generate resonates with people.

How do Cambridge voters understand the proportional ranked choice system? Do you find yourself doing lots of voter education?

As a baseline, we have a good political culture, there’s really good explainers and other materials, Cambridge residents are extremely well educated, and enough people get it to explain it to other people who don’t. The government and council actually do a lot of voter education on top of that, because the median length of residency of a voter in Cambridge is so low that for a lot of people it’s their first time doing ranked choice voting.

One trade-off of our system of doing everything at-large is that we have almost 20 candidates run, and getting voters to understand the comprehensive differences between 20 candidates is really, really difficult.

Cambridge voters tend to have a good understanding of who’s likely to win a seat and who the marginal candidates are that don’t really have a shot, but even the short list can still be a lot of candidates to sort through. So what the benefit might be of Portland having smaller districts is that you might have more like six candidates running. Six is a much more understandable number for most people; they’ll be able to get a sense of what’s going on in each district.

How do voters decide between all those candidates?

In Cambridge we tend to see slates, groups of candidates you’re ...