Brennan named unofficial winner in Portland mayoral race

Michael Brennan was named the unofficial winner in the historic Portland mayoral race just moments ago after several rounds of instant runoffs redistributed the second choice votes of every other mayoral candidate except runner-up Ethan Strimling.

With 13 other candidates eliminated, and with their respective second choice votes reallocated, Brennan finished the race with 8,971 votes, compared to Strimling’s 7,138.

Current City Council-appointed Mayor Nicholas Mavodones was the last to be eliminated from the running, with 4,075 votes in his favor after the previous 12 candidates were cut from the list.

In the instant runoff process, second choice votes from the lower ranked candidates are redistributed among higher ranked candidates until any individual candidate claims a simple majority.

The reason this is considered an unofficial result is that elections officials only reviewed about 1,000 of the 19,000-plus ballots scanned into the vote counting machines today. Caleb Kleppner of elections consultant TrueBallot said that after the 1,000 checks they did today, they’re confident a review of the rest of the ballots tomorrow will simply cement the results. He called the vote tabulation software “extraordinarily accurate” after elections officials eyeballed their first 1,000.

Photo below courtesy of Darren Fishell.

Seth Koenig

About Seth Koenig

Seth has nearly a decade of professional journalism experience and writes about the greater Portland region.