Ranked-choice voting is an electoral method that can be a boon to democracy and progressive candidates—except when it’s not.

Oregon appears to be on the brink of opting for that second option—the "except when it’s not" one.

This week, the largely Democratic Oregon House approved a bill (HB 2004) that would put a measure on the 2024 ballot which, if voters approve it, would establish a somewhat peculiar version of ranked-choice voting for nearly all state and federal offices. The bill may be voted on as early as today by the largely Democratic state Senate, and if passed, would guarantee placement on that ballot.

I termed the bill "peculiar" for two reasons. The first is that it mandates ranked-choice voting for all state and federal offices except those in the legislature. That is, House members exempted only themselves and their Senate colleagues from ranked-choice voting, though it’s themselves and their Senate colleagues, should the latter group follow suit, who are putting the bill on the ballot. One can only presume that, since they were elected under the current system, they think it works just fine for them and don’t want to screw with it.

But there’s another, less immediately obvious reason why the bill is peculiar. Oregon is a heavily Democratic state; its governor, U.S. senators, and majorities of its congressional and state legislative delegations are all Democrats, and generally liberal Democrats at that. But due to the particulars of Oregon politics, subjecting the state’s congressional districts to ranked-choice voting could very well enable Republicans to win seats held by Democrats and to hold onto seats that Democrats could otherwise win.

Two of Oregon’s six congressional districts are swing districts. The Fifth District is represented by Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a first-termer who narrowly won the seat in the 2020 election. The Sixth Congressional District is represented by progressive Democrat Andrea Salinas, also a first-termer who narrowly won that seat in 2020.

Here’s where ranked-choice voting could put both of those seats out of reach for the Democrats, or at least diminish their chances for victory. There are four minor parties with ballot status in Oregon. On the left and in the center, respectively, there’s the Working Families Party and the Independent Party. Oregon doesn’t have the kind of electoral fusion system that New York has, under which, say, the Working Families Party can have a separate ballot line, and if it nominates the same candidate who’s running on the Democratic Party line, the votes for that candidate on the WFP line will be added to the candidate’s votes on the Democratic line. In Oregon, however, a Democratic candidate can run just on one line, but can note that he or she is also the nominee of other parties—most frequently, the WFP and the Independents.

Given the immense gulf between Democratic and Republican candidates these days, Democratic nominees almost invariably do have the support of those two parties. In a sense, those nominees are already the recipients of the votes of those WFP and Independent supporters. Hence, the effect of ranked-choice voting that would enable them to get votes from those other parties’ supporters is obviated by the fact that they already have them.

The situation on the right side of the ballot is the polar opposite of that. To the extreme right of the Republicans are the Libertarian and Constitution Parties, which invariably nominate their own candidates for office, who are distinctly not also the Republican nominees. These candidates invariably win several thousand votes. Under a ranked-choice system, voters who opt to vote for the Constitutionalist or the Libertarian would be able to vote for the Republican as their number two choice. In the state’s two swing districts, that could definitely help Republicans win those seats.

Consider the 2022 election in the Sixth District. There, Salinas defeated her Republican opponent by 7,210 votes. Had that Republican been able to add via ranked-choice voting the 6,762 votes that went to the Constitution Party’s candidate, plus the 513 votes that went to the other minor-party candidates, Democrat Salinas would have lost the election by 65 votes. To be sure, not all the votes of the extreme-right parties would go to the Republican as a second choice, but this example is illustrative of an outcome that is clearly quite possible—and one that would shift election results rightward if ranked-choice voting is adopted.

Ranked-choice voting is almost always a positive in party primaries, but in general elections, it can work, like the Lord, in mysterious ways, not all of them good (again, alas, like the Lord; see, e.g., the Book of Job). It’s not clear that Oregon Democrats have thought through the consequences of this legislation. They had oughta’, pretty damn quick.