Rathband taking an analytical approach to Day 2 mayoral vote count

Portland mayoral candidate Jed Rathband, who came out of political obscurity to rank among the upper echelon of hopefuls in the race, said his nascent campaigning career is over… for now.

He said he’s really looking forward to watching the Day 2 vote retabulations, which will help him analyze the race he ran and think about his future. First things first, Rathband said he plans to visit his sister in Texas next week, then “dust off” the client list he built up for his Stone’s Throw Consulting to get the operation “up and running again.”

After the first round of votes were counted on Election Day, Rathband finds himself in fifth place out of the 15 candidates, a strong ranking but essentially a statistical impossibility to win. But during his spirited campaign, he touted himself as the “fresh face” candidate with no experience in public offices and thus no “political baggage,” he claimed the coveted endorsement of the Portland Community Chamber’s political action committee.

It will be interesting to see what the numbers reveal, where my strengths were and were my weaknesses were,” Rathband said. “Where my No. 2 votes where. It’s possible I could move up to fourth place and it’s possible I could fall down to eighth place.”

For more on what’s going on today, check out my back posts on this blog, which explain the Day 2 process. Right now, we’re waiting as the software brought in by elections consultant TrueBallot processes the nearly 20,000 yellow mayoral ballots scanned in during an earlier process.

After this, elections officials will review all of the ballots to make sure the software accurately reflects how the ballots are marked. That stage of things is expected to take another couple of hours.

Once that review is finished, they’ll begin retabulating votes to ultimately determine the winner, through several rounds of “instant runoffs.” We may not have a winner declared officially until after 7 p.m.

 

 

 

Seth Koenig

About Seth Koenig

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