Hardly anyone knows how the “rank choice voting” that’s about to determine the Portland city elections really works. Oh sure, the concept of ranking candidates is pretty easy to understand, but how the ranked votes are going to be counted and how the winners are going to be determined requires a degree in statistics. The voters are expected to trust what they don’t understand. It’s nuts.

I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of it myself. I think I’ve figured out how the mayor’s race will be counted; I wrote it up here. But I’m still puzzling over the City Council races; as of yet, I’ve only gotten this far.

But while I try to figure that one out, I did notice and report an apparent error on the Multnomah County elections website, which the county has now corrected. Until yesterday, it read in part as follows:

That formula’s not right, at least when you apply it to the mayor’s race. In the mayor’s race, the winner does not have to have 50 percent plus 1 of the total number of ballots received. He or she needs only 50 percent plus 1 of the votes being counted in the final round of “rank choice” tallying. By that time, some voters will have been declared “inactive,” and their ballots will no longer count.

Here’s how the page now reads, as corrected:

It’s no wonder that the county had a hard time explaining it correctly. The untested, goofball system that the city charter commission jesters devised takes three and a half pages to explain in the city code. Anyway, it’s nice to see the poor vote-counters in Multnomah County, who have to implement the insanity, cleaning up their mistake. 

Of course, small parts of Portland are in Washington and Clackamas Counties, and you have to hope and pray that the elections folks in those two offices are on the same page. At least in Clackistan, high levels of confidence and goodwill have not been earned over the years.

Between last-minute ballots trickling in (they all count if postmarked by Election Day), three counties involved, and multiple rounds of two different versions of “rank choice” being required, including the more complex system in each of four council districts, I’m sure the results are going to be a mite slow. Not to mention impossibly complicated to understand. Election night parties will probably consist of people dancing around giant inflatable question marks.

Eventually winners will be declared. Then there will be the sour grapes, and maybe the lawsuits. Portland wouldn’t have it any other way.