Yes, Portland has a reputation for being … weird. Believe it or not, some of its elected officials actually want more people to vote.
Last election a local activist for renter’s rights, Chloe Eudaly, was elected to the City Council, defeating incumbent Steve Novick for the office. She had run on a platform of taking steps to end homelessness & the predatory practices of too many landlords. (Since city & local elections are non-partisan, I honestly don’t know if she is a registered Democrat, Green, or Independent. I do know that cartoonist Joe Sacco created a flier for her campaign, & since I knew of Sacco because we attended the same high school — he’d done a few political cartoons during those years as a hobby — & I’ve followed his subsequent career, I felt that was enough of an endorsement for me.)
Following her election, Eudaly was put in charge of the Portland Bureau of Transportation, & the Office of Community & Civic Life, which sorta enables her to achieve her goals. However, I haven’t heard much from her since she took office. Until last week. Willamette Week reported:
On Oct. 23, Eudaly unveiled her plan for the last Friday before Election Day. She'll send city workers on a door-to-door canvassing event Nov. 2 to encourage registered voters who have not turned in ballots in recent elections to cast one this year.
The public employees that did this would be volunteers. They would work those precincts with a history of less than 50% returned their ballots. (Oregon is a vote-by-mail state.) And their canvassing would be limited to leaving door hangers which will include locations of official ballot drop boxes and where to get more information on candidates and ballot measures. (The door hangers would cost about $1000.)
So what would be the harm this innocuous exercise of civic pride? Who could possibly object to this? Need I ask?
"This is a transparently partisan misuse of City funds to aid Kate Brown's losing campaign," said county Republican party chair James Buchal in a statement. Willamette Week’s article on the Republican objection notes:
But the complaint takes issue with the initiative on more technical grounds: "As far as we know, door-to-door political activity of this nature is not within the job descriptions of the employees involved, and there have been no funds in the City budget allocated for this purpose," write Buchal and nine other Portland taxpayers in the letter dated October 29.
If the name James Buchal seems familiar to some of you, it might be because Buchal was quoted by The Guardian proposing that the Republican party ought to have their event security provided by right-wing militia groups “like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters” instead of the Portland Police.
To conclude on a much more positive note, Portland will be electing an African-American woman to the City Council next week. Both Loretta Smith & Jo Ann Hardesty — the two candidates for the open seat — are African American, & unless something totally off the wall happens — say James Buchal pulls off a surprise write-in campaign — the City Council will become a bit more diverse.