Members of the Fair Elections Portland campaign rallied outside of Portland City Hall on Friday afternoon to celebrate the successful collection of more than 8,000 signatures for each of two election reform questions, which will now likely head to Portland’s November ballot.
One question looks to amend the city’s charter to make ranked-choice voting — which is already used to elect Portland’s mayor — the standard for Portland city council and school board elections as well. The other would create a public funding program for municipal candidates, in the vein of the statewide Maine Clean Elections law, to be designed and implemented by the city council.
If passed, these charter amendments have the potential to bring more economic and racial diversity to city politics, according to Anna Kellar, executive director of Democracy Maine, a collaboration of the League of Women Voters of Maine and Maine Citizens for Clean Elections, which helped organize the Fair Elections Portland campaign.
Ranked-choice voting, paired with a public funding program, would help make Portland politics “more accessible to everyday voters,” said Kellar, and allow for “a better diversity of candidates” running for elected office.
With Portland becoming a boom town for developers, the decisions of city council members can lead to lucrative contracts, which has resulted in real estate companies taking greater interest in local politics and often contributing significant funds to municipal candidates.
“The cost of running for local office has been increasing hugely over the last few years,” said Kellar. “You shouldn’t have to raise tens of thousands of dollars, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, to run for local office.”
Portland would be the first city in Maine with publicly-financed, ranked-choice city council elections, and one of just a handful of municipalities in the country to enact one or both electoral reforms if both initiatives are successful.
6,816 valid voter signatures were required to place a referendum on the municipal ballot, or 20 percent of Portland voter turnout in the 2018 election. With more than 8,000 collected for each question by more than 100 volunteers with Fair Elections Portland, both measures seem likely to make the fall ballot.
(Top photo: Boxes of signed petitions placed by volunteers outside of Portland City Hall | Cara DeRose)
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