A substantial share of Portland residents who voted in last week’s election left their preference for mayor or City Council entirely blank, despite having the ability to rank up to six candidates from sprawling fields in each race.

Champions of the new, voter-endorsed ranked-choice method for local Portland elections touted the system’s promise to boost civic engagement and drive up the number of people who cast ballots.

But the opposite occurred during its debut, an analysis by The Oregonian shows.

From 17% to 29% of residents who voted in each of the city’s four new council districts — an average of 20% citywide — didn’t rank a single candidate to represent them, far more than the share who sat out City Council contests in the previous two election cycles.

In east Portland, the city’s poorest and most racially diverse quadrant, a combination of low voter turnout and low rates of ranking even a single City Council candidate by voters who did cast ballots meant only 39% of registered voters had any say in which three candidates will represent the district, the newsroom analysis found.

About 11% of Portlanders who cast a ballot this year didn’t vote for any of the 19 candidates for mayor or provide a write-in alternative, compared to 6% in 2020’s general election between incumbent Ted Wheeler and challenger Sarah Iannarone.

The massive rates of nonparticipation in ranked-choice voting was not what advocates predicted or academics said they found in other jurisdictions. Portland’s particular system of ranked-choice voting is not used to select City Council members in any other U.S. city.

With a brand-new system, 16 to 30 candidates sought election in each of the city’s districts, a dizzying array of options not expected to be repeated in coming years.

“My overall conclusion is that the voters were overwhelmed, found the system and number of candidates too hard and didn’t feel confident in their vote choice,” said Ellen Seljan, a political science professor at Lewis & Clark College. “The easier thing to do is to skip those races entirely.”

The switch to ranked-choice voting was among several significant government and election reforms Portland voters widely approved two years ago amid deepening dissatisfaction with how Oregon’s most populous city is run and who’s been elected to lead it.

Voters were allowed to choose up to six candidates in order of preference in both the mayoral and City Council races. A trio of council candidates from each district needed 25% of first-, second- and potentially even fifth- and sixth-choice votes to win.

Proponents of Portland’s election reforms said they would better capture diverse political preferences, produce winners who satisfy more of the electorate and increase the number of people who’d vote.

While the 12 candidates who captured or are poised to win City Council seats possess a wide range of political views, backgrounds and personal experience, they were elected by a smaller portion of voters than past Portland councils.

“Obviously, it doesn’t thrill me,” said Melanie Billings-Yun, who served as co-chair of the Portland Charter Commission that referred the package of reforms to voters in 2022. “Some people freaked out a little.”

In the district encompassing Portland east of Interstate 205, 29% of residents who cast ballots didn’t rank any of the 16 candidates running. That figure was 18% in north and northeast Portland (22 candidates); 17% in southeast Portland (30 candidates); 17% in the city’s west-side district (30 candidates); and an average of 20% citywide.

Only 7% of voters who cast ballots in the November 2022 election sat out the highly polarized City Council runoff between Jo Ann Hardesty and Rene Gonzalez. And 13% did in the fall 2020 contest between Chloe Eudaly and Mingus Mapps.

Bob Weinstein, who ran unsuccessfully for City Council on Portland’s west side and who was a vocal skeptic of the new system, said last week’s results were precisely what he was concerned about.

“It clearly shows that the efforts, in my opinion, to educate people how to vote were not successful,” Weinstein said. “It also tells me that the multimember election system, which puts so many candidates on the ballot at the same time, effectively disenfranchised many people in Portland.”

“It’s very anti-democratic, to me, to have a result like this,” Weinstein said.