Isaac Laquedem

An ode to Alex Jones's recent court losses

It was a solemn rite as e’er
Was seen by mortal man.
The celebrants, the people there,
Were all Republican.

Ed Rollins bent his grizzled head,
And Ari Fleischer too,
And one⁠—’twas Tucker, someone said,
Though no one clearly knew.

I saw the priest, white-robed and tall
Of strictly right-wing views
He was the pious man men call
To cast blessings on Fox News.

Ah, ’twas a high and holy rite
As anyone could swear.
“What does it mean?” I asked a wight
Who knelt apart in prayer.

“A mass for the repose,” he said,
“Of Alex Jones's ⁠—“What,
Is Alex Jones now dead?
’Tis sad, ’tis sad, God wot!”

“A mass”⁠—repeated he, and rose
To go and kneel among
The worshipers⁠—“for the repose
Of Alex Jones's tongue.”

-- Ambrose Bierce, brought up to date

Endorsements V - that famous ballot measure to rejigger the Portland City Council

Back in a bygone era of tech, someone had the bright idea to combine a television with a video cassette recorder, figuring that viewers would want to both record shows directly from their television, and play back videotapes through their television.  The idea was sound; the execution was not.  The manufacturers combined not-very-good screens with not-very-good VCRs.  They ended up with not-very-good appliances. 

Portland's measure 26-228, proposed by the Portland Charter Commission that was appointed for this purpose, would increase the city council from 5 to 12 and divide the city into districts, with three councilors elected from each district.  Under the proposal the mayor would have the right to introduce ordinances and break tie votes, but would not be a member of the city council.  The mayor's primary function would be to supervise the City Administrator, a new position.

Measure 26-228 would also change how the city counts votes.  The mayor and city auditor would be elected by ranked-choice voting, a system used in some other American cities that allows a candidate in a crowded race who is no one's first choice but everyone's second or third choice a shot at being elected.  The city councilors, however, would be chosen by a sort of hybrid method (think TV plus VCR here) in which voters would rank their candidates by preference, as with ranked-choice voting.  The difference comes in how the ballots are counted.  Let us suppose that 90,000 ballots are marked in a particular council district, with three persons to be elected.  The three persons would each need 30,000 votes to be elected.  Now imagine that the race has attracted seven candidates (call them A through G, like notes on a scale).  If 42,000 people mark A as their first choice, then A will keep 30,000 of those votes and be elected.  The other 12,000 votes of A will be reallocated to the second choices of those voters.  After the excess A ballots are allocated, the lowest of the remaining 6 candidates, let's say it's candidate G, will be eliminated, and G's votes will be reallocated to the voter's second choice, if the second choice is not A, who has already been elected, or  G because it's a transferred vote of someone who ranked A first and G second.  I think those ballots get reallocated to the voters' third choices.

Then the process starts anew with the candidates B, C, D, E, and F.  If one of them now (let's say it's B) has more than 30,000 votes then B is elected and the excess votes of B are now allocated among C, D, E, and F, who may have been ranked second, third, or fourth on those ballots.  The lowest finisher, let's say it's now F, is eliminated, and F's votes are allocated among C, D, and E.  The process may continue for one or two more rounds, depending on how the votes are cast. 

One problem with devising a vote-counting method for a race with more than two candidates is that in 1951 Kenneth Arrow proved that it is impossible to design a vote-counting system that is assured to yield a winner and that satisfies five basic requirements of fairness: first, that it not produce a cyclical result in which the voters prefer A to B, B to C, C to D, and D to A; second, that the result does not always match the preferences of any particular individual (i.e., no dictatorship); third, that it can handle any possible combination of voting alternatives (e.g., people who vote for fewer than the maximum number of candidates, or who have odd orders of preference); fourth, that it respect head-to-head alternatives (e.g., if more than half of the voters rank A above B, then A will finish the count ahead of B); and fifth, that the system respects unanimous individual preferences (e.g., if everyone ranks A above B, then under no circumstances can B win and A lose).   One person of the many who submitted public comments, James Kahan, mentioned Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.  I don't know if the Charter Commission discussed it, and ranked-choice voting survived for the mayor's and auditor's seats but not for the city council.

What did survive for the city council is a kludge - a collection of ill-fit parts without a coherent design.  The Charter Commission had a good idea when it proposed to remove the "commissioner" part of the city council's duties and to make them simply councilors to establish policy that the mayor, through the city administrator, would then implement.  I'll agree that we are ready to elect councilors from districts to ensure that each part of the city is known to someone on the council, which is rarely the case.  (The Laquedem memory goes back to a time when four of the five councilors lived in Irvington or Alameda.)  I'm not persuaded that the council has any systemic problem that we can solve by tripling its size and converting the governing body from a council to a jury-sized debating forum.  I recommend a NO vote on Measure 26-228.  I look forward to the proposal that Commissioner Mapps intends to bring forth in the spring.

 

Endorsements IV - A Clackamas County race and the Portland City Council

Isaac briefly diverts from the Rose City to look southward to Clackamas County and its most important race on the 2022 ballot, which is neither of the races for the county commission, but the campaign for county clerk, in which Catherine McMullen, a Multnomah County elections administrator, is challenging longtime incumbent Sherry Hall.  The most visible function of the county clerk is to supervise the county's elections.  Ms. Hall has racked up an impressive number of unforced election errors since she was first elected in 2002, amassing enough mistakes and bad conduct to fill a Willamette Week article in 2012.  In the ten years since then she's continued to fumble county elections, which WW helpfully compiled into another article this summer.  Voters in Clackamas County should give the office an upgrade that's long overdue, and replace Ms. Hall with Catherine McMullen.

One position on the Portland City Council is on next week's ballot.  Incumbent Jo Ann Hardesty and businessman Rene Gonzalez are in a runoff for a council seat.  Mr. Gonzalez has made street crime and homelessness centers of his campaign.  Commissioner Hardesty responds that she led the push to improve Portland Street Response, a non-police response to persons having crises of mental health, and has supported funding increases for permanent housing.  Underlying their debate is the City's interpretation of a Ninth Circuit case from 2018, Martin v, City of Boise, which some believe bars Portland from prohibiting the homeless from camping outdoors.

Before I turn to the Martin case, let's start with some data.  Since at least 2009 Multnomah County has conducted biennial censuses of homeless persons, though the census scheduled for 2021 was postponed to January 2022.  Homeless persons are counted in three categories: the unsheltered (people living outdoors, in tents, and in cars), people in shelters, and people in transitional housing.  From 2009 to 2019 the number of homeless persons counted in Multnomah County was fairly constant, ranging from 3801 in 2015 to 4655 in 2011.  The unsheltered population was also fairly constant, ranging between 1,591 in 2009 and 2,037 in 2019, with a typical number being about 1,800.

Something changed between 2019 and 2022, because the 2022 census found 5,228 homeless people in Multnomah County (up 30% from 2019), of whom 3,057 were unsheltered, living in tents or cars - up an astonishing 50% from 2019 and unique in the tri-county area.  (Over the same three-year period Clackamas County's count of the unsheltered fell from 371 to 327, a 9% drop, and Washington County's count of the unsheltered went from 232 to 227, essentially flat.) 

What has changed since 2019?  Isaac suggests these four factors, one of which is unique to Portland and another to Multnomah County.  The first is that in 2020 Oregon voters approved Measure 110, which decriminalized possession of many ordinary street drugs for personal use.  Measure 110 was billed as replacing drug policing with drug treatment.  The drug policing has stopped; the drug treatment has not started.  (Read what OPB said about Measure 110 last year.)  Consequently demand for street drugs has increased, and with it the customers' search for funds with which to buy drugs.  Glass repair shops and street-level retailers have become the involuntary funders.

Second is that even as Portland worked to get people off the street and into shelter, Multnomah County happily handed out tents and tarps to enable homeless persons to continue to live outside.  Last year Multnomah County distributed 6,550 tents to the homeless in the county, meaning mainly to people living on Portland streets and in Portland parks, which is somewhere between two and three tents for each unsheltered person in the county.

Third is that Portland took Martin v. City of Boise as barring the city from removing tents and prohibiting public camping unless the city could provide shelter to every unsheltered person in the city.  On this point I believe the city erred.  This short piece in the Harvard Law Review explains the ins and outs of the Martin decision in detail.  My take is that the decision prohibits cities from prosecuting the homeless for sleeping in public at night if shelter beds are available.  If not enough shelter beds are available on a particular night to accommodate all unsheltered persons in the city, then the city may not criminalize those who sleep without shelter.  It may, however, restrict sleeping and camping to designated areas; it may prohibit camping in other areas; it may continue to prosecute the unsheltered who take and dismantle cars.

That brings me to the fourth factor, and back to the city's election.  The fourth factor is that the city council and the Multnomah County district attorney have sent a clear message to the Police Bureau to stop enforcing minor laws, in particular property crimes.  Commissioner Hardesty led that message, both by securing a $15 million cut in the police budget and in pushing to cut another $18 million and 42 vacant police positions, a move that failed in 2020 and is one of the causes of downtown Portland's pandemic of broken windows.

The happy day when county prosecutors will revise their priorities must await the election of 2024.  Portland voters can take one small step toward refreshing the city by giving Rene Gonzalez the chance to argue his policies as a city councilor.

 

Endorsements III: The race for Governor

Christine Drazan and Tina Kotek, the two major-party candidates for Oregon's governorship, conflict over the role that unaffiliated candidate Betsy Johnson, a former Democrat, will play in next week's election.  Ms. Drazan asserts that Ms. Johnson is a spoiler who will siphon republican votes away and give Ms. Kotek the win.  Ms. Kotek's campaign equally vociferously claims that Ms. Johnson will siphon Democratic votes away and give Ms. Drazan the victory. 

They can't both be right.  Some recent polls suggest that Ms. Drazan is more successful at holding on to republicans than Ms. Kotek has been in drawing support from Democrats, which strongly implies that Ms. Johnson's views are closer to the Democratic center than to the republican center, and less strongly implies that Ms. Kotek is farther from the Democratic center than Ms. Drazan is from the republican center. 

All three candidates agree, however, that the administration of Governor Kate Brown has been a failure.  It's not surprising that Mss. Drazan and Johnson would campaign against Governor Brown; what's changed in the last three weeks is that Tina Kotek is also campaigning against Governor Brown.  The Brown administration's failures and missteps may be the only subjects on which the three candidates agree, and polls show her to be the nation's most disliked governor.

The voters that really matter in Oregon's statewide races, however, are the non-affiliated voters.  (They used to be called "independents" before an enterprising would-be politician grabbed the name "Independent" for a minor political party.)  About a third of Oregon's voters are non-affiliated and another third are Democrats.  About a quarter are republicans.    The non-affiliated voters slightly outnumber the Democrats. 

All three candidates are qualified by legislative experience to serve as governor.  Except for their shared dislike of Governor Brown and their professed willingness to allocate state resources to ameliorate the crisis of the homeless camps and their attendant crime and filth, Mss. Drazan and Kotek share no ideological ground.  Ms. Johnson is somewhere in between them.  She does state, however, that she is willing to try to solve Oregon's problems without resorting to party lines, and as an independent governor she would have to try.

Despite Christine Drazan being in the reasonable wing of her party - unlike some of her legislative caucus she is not an election denier - I can't persuade myself to vote for a republican for governor until the party as a whole regains its moral bearings.  Neither can I bring myself to vote for Tina Kotek, who is running against an administration that she spent the last several years supporting.  This year I am voting for Betsy Johnson, whom I believe to be the best of the candidates to lead Oregon through its current mess. 

By voting for Betsy Johnson do I increase the chance that Christine Drazan is elected?  Perhaps.  I'm willing to take that risk both because I believe that the Oregon Democratic party should return to the days when it earned support instead of demanding it, and because I believe that Ms. Kotek would take my vote for her, tiny though it be in the overall total, as an enthusiastic endorsement instead of a reluctant concession.