Jesse Cornett was the only candidate to qualify for public financing of his primary campaign (VOE: voter-owner elections); he finished a distant, and very disappointing, third place. The Portland Mercury figured that his results amounted to $29 per vote. (Matt Davis, who wrote the article, pissed and moaned about $10,000 of that going to Kari Chisholm of Mandate Media/BlueOregon.com, which was churlish in the extreme. That money would have been more pure in the hands of tv or radio stations? Another example of Davis’ inability to separate reporting from his personal feelings.) The question isn’t whether this was a good expenditure of not — can anyone say the campaign did not do a lot of good things that might not have happened otherwise, from pressuring Saltzman and the Mayor on the police to bringing a real campaign to East Portland? The meaningful question isn’t whether this was money well-spent but what else do we need to do to make elections more open and democratic.

In the other City Council race, none of the challengers even sought public funding. As a result, Nick Fish waltzed to victory without having to face a single tough question. He was given a pass, and that’s never a good idea in any election. Saltzman had to make a case for himself; he had to stand before voters and cameras and answer tough questions. To his credit, he did so and he did enough to win re-election. If Walt Nichols, an intelligent and informed citizen, had $150,000 to mount a credible campaign, he might still have gotten waxed as Cornett did, but he would have also forced Fish to run a real campaign. Voters would have had a real choice in that race, as they did in Saltzman’s.

Money is never enough to win an election. In the Multnomah County Commissioner race to replace Jeff Cogen, Chuck Currie’s fundraising was not enough to prevent him from finishing far back in the field. Every campaign has its own dynamics, and in that contest, the two African-American women won through to the general election runoff — it appears voters wanted a real change in Board composition. In the Fish race, voters had no choice. Cornett had more money than anyone save Saltzman, but he also had this hurdle, as noted by his consultant, Michael Grossman: an 80%-15% name-recognition gap. Three months and $150,000 are both insufficient to overcome that kind of gap, but Cornett was hoping to do well enough to get himself into the longer general election.

Didn’t happen.

People are going to piss and moan about the expense and the lack of tangible results (Amanda Fritz being the only non-incumbent to win office using public financing, and it took her two tries in two years). What we need to look at, if we care about open and fair elections, is what is needed to make VOE more effective. Clearly money is not enough to help bring new candidates into the fray and give them a realistic chance. We need to do more.

We need instant-runoff voting.

With IRV, voters do not have to worry that they “waste” their ballot by voting for someone who has little or no chance to win. There are plenty of people in Portland who are happy to vote for the no-hopers, but most people want to feel their vote is meaningful. “Why vote for an outsider if that means the incumbent with all the money gets re-elected so easily? But that outsider is who I care about!” With IRV, voters rank all the candidates in order of preference. Therefore, if their first choice ends up dead last, their second-place vote then gets counted. Until one candidate gets 50%-plus-one, you move through the rounds counting first, second, third-place voters and more.

In IRV, people who didn’t want to vote for Cornett but wanted to keep Saltzman out could have made Cornett their second or third place choice — and given Saltzman no vote at all. With 24% turnout, as happened (shamefully) in Multnomah County, that may not have mattered; but with IRV and its ability to give voters a much broader range of real choices, turnout is likely to increase a great deal. Clearly many people who had no desire to see Saltzman re-elected simply chose not to vote at all. What if they knew they could have a range of choices, not just Saltzman-or-no one? That’s the purpose of IRV: to give voters a menu of choices, all of which stand a chance of being counted. For for Crazy Bob, but also vote for a second choice, and a third. Bob may not win, but enough people may vote for enough other candidates to force a second round of vote-counting — and choice #2, while less meaningful than Crazy Bob but “damn better than that incumbent”, could push forward.

The purpose of these alternatives to a privatized, market-based electoral system is not to be efficient or cost-effective: it’s to bring more voters into the process and to give them better choices made under more equitable conditions. Incumbents have a huge advantage; Saltzman has years in the public eye with the chance to use his office to, in effect, campaign for re-election. Cornett had three months and a moderate pot of cash to introduce himself and make the case to dump an incumbent many voters were comfortable with. Instant-runoff voting would have given more voters a reason to vote: to know that one of their choices, albeit not their first, could count and help change the course of an election.

We need to do anything that improves Voter-owner Elections. The presence of the January special election hurt several candidates trying to get the necessary 1,000 signatures and $5 contributions to qualify; it certainly did in Jason Renaud. We need a way to cope with that, perhaps change the qualifying period or allowing an additional two weeks beyond a special election date. But we need to keep VOE. If Portland dumps it on the basis of win-loss percentage, we lost any realistic chance at election reform. Mandatory limits on spending appear to be a lost cause for a very long time; VOE forced Saltzman to limit his own spending voluntarily or look like someone trying to buy an election. VOE also allowed Fritz to run successive campaigns, getting name familiarity and campaign experience in 2006 and then to win handily in 2008.

But VOE isn’t enough. We need to bolster it with other democracy-enhancing tools. Instant-runoff voting would be a great partner with VOE. I hope the advisory group that will be preparing the ballot item for the November election — for Portland voters to decide whether to extend VOE — will either add IRV or make clear that such enhancements would expand the potential of VOE. Because if we dump public financing of elections simply because we don’t like the results, we turn our elections back to those who have the connections to get a lot of cash — we put the City Council back up for sale to the highest bidder.

And that’s already enough of a problem.