In May, Eugene residents will see a proposal that could change how voting is done in the city. STAR voting is a system that allows voters to score all candidates on a scale from zero to five. The top two candidates with the highest scores will enter an automatic runoff election and the one with the most number of voters supporting them wins. If passed by voters, city elections for Eugene’s mayor, city council and utility board will be selected using this system for the 2026 elections. Sara Wolk is the executive director of Equal Vote Coalition and the chief petitioner for STAR voting in Eugene. She joins us to share more on what makes this system different from ranked choice voting and what its adoption could mean for the city if passed.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Next month, Eugene voters will decide whether or not to change the way city elections are run. STAR voting asks voters to score all candidates on a scale from 0 to 5. The two candidates with the highest scores enter an automatic runoff, and the one with the most support wins. If passed by voters next month, STAR voting would be in place for Eugene’s mayoral, city council, and utility board races starting in 2026. Sara Wolk is the executive director of the Equal Vote Coalition, and the chief petitioner for STAR voting in Eugene, and she joins us now. Welcome to the show.
Sara Wolk: Fantastic, thanks for having me here.
Miller: Thanks for joining us. What’s wrong with the dominant voting system that’s in place in most of Oregon right now, most of the country, of just choosing a single candidate among a group of them?
Wolk: Our current system works fantastically if there are only two candidates in the race, or if there’s only two political parties in the political paradigm. But if we have more competitive elections, we can have a majority coalition that together has a majority of voters, and they end up divided and conquered, where if voters don’t strategically band together and vote for that frontrunner on their side who seems the most electable, then they split the vote. It’s called vote splitting, or the spoiler effect, often blamed on these third party spoilers, but it can happen in nonpartisan and local elections, and does all the time. So that’s the problem that we’re really setting out to fix with voting reform.
We’re really focused on voting method reform, the voting method itself. There’s also gerrymandering, there’s many problems. We’re laser focused on this one piece of the puzzle.
Miller: And you have zeroed in with your laser focus on a particular change in the way elections would be structured. Can you explain? Because I gave two sentences and it’s not nearly enough, how STAR voting works, maybe just starting with what a ballot would look like?
Wolk: So with STAR voting instead of choosing one candidate only when you go to vote, you would score your candidates from zero up to five stars. So a ballot in Oregon would likely look like bubbles. And you fill in the bubble for five stars for your favorite, zero stars for your last choice, or leave them blank. Then you score other candidates as desired, which lets you show your preference order, and also lets you show how much or how little you like those candidates.
Miller: And even though you say preference order, you could also have two of them be five stars, right, and one be three and one be one?
Wolk: Yeah, and that’s really the magic of it. No matter what type of field of candidates you have, you can honestly vote and just show your opinion. You could have two candidates who you like equally. You can show your preferences between candidates when you do have a preference. You’re able to show, is your second choice almost as good as your favorite? Give them four stars. Or is your second choice a lesser evil and you really don’t like them, but there’s somebody even worse out there that you are scared of? Give that lesser evil candidate one star, and if it does come down to it, at least your vote will help prevent your worst case scenario.
Miller: The way I’m imagining the ballot looking when someone finished filling it out, it reminds me a little bit of one of those health care experience questionnaires that I feel like I get now. You see a doctor, and then I get in the mail, “on a score of 0 to 5, how prompt was it? What was it like? What was the communication like?” and on and on. I imagine that’s sort of what my ballot would end up looking like if this were in place.
Wolk: Exactly. And that’s kind of what I picture as well. One of the good things about it is STAR voting is a new idea in terms of voting. But in terms of the voter experience, we’ve all filled out a million of those types of surveys. And there’s hundreds, thousands or more studies on public opinion and how to measure it. And the five star rating really tops the charts in terms of being stable, user friendly, expressive, but not overly complex. Just a great way to measure social opinion and public choice.
Miller: So that is the voter side of it. Then what happens when, in Oregon, these are mailed in or put into a dropbox? How does the counting work?
Wolk: One of the reasons we’re promoting STAR voting and not ranked choice is because of this next step, what happens once you’ve mailed in your ballot. STAR voting is fully compatible with all of our current election infrastructure. It would still be vote-by-mail. In elections that are already nonpartisan or that already are partisan, we’re not changing any of that with our proposals. We’re really just trying to keep it simple. And ballots would still be tallied at the local level, you would still get results on election night, none of that would change.
But to get to your question on how is STAR voting counted, it’s basically a two step process. I like to think of that as kind of filling the niche of a primary and a general election all in one.
STAR stands for Score, Then Automatic Runoff. And that’s exactly how it works. You score the candidates 0 to 5 stars in that scoring round. You add up all the ballots and find the two highest scoring candidates overall. Those are your two finalists who will advance to an automatic runoff.
And then in the runoff, each voter counts as one vote. And your ballot counts as your one vote for the finalist you prefer. So whichever finalist you scored higher, gets your vote.
Miller: Why add that second layer here? In other words, why have an automatic runoff? It does seem slightly easier to simply go with the candidate after the simple tabulation that has the highest score.
Wolk: The highest scoring candidate overall is almost always going to be your winner. But there’s a big difference between stars, which measure enthusiasm, and voters. And in our political system, we want to know how many voters preferred this actual person. And that’s what that runoff does. The first round measures quality of support. The second round measures quantity of supporters. And because of that, you get a better outcome than quality or quantity alone.
Miller: Is part of the idea there also that even if a particular voter’s favorite candidate, say the only one that they gave five stars to, is not in the runoff, that that voter would still theoretically have a say because they may have expressed a preference among the actual top two. Maybe one of them got three and one of them got two, so that voter still has a say in this election?
Wolk: Absolutely. That’s really my “why” statement, personally. For me, when I first got involved, the pitch that I wanted to give was I want to be able to vote my conscience. I don’t want my vote to be wasted if my favorite can’t win. And I wanna accurately elect candidates who really reflect the will of the people. That’s what the STAR voting runoff really does. The scoring system, the five star ballot, really allows you to vote your conscience and show who you prefer to who. You’re not just voting for the frontrunner on your side who you think can win.
And the reason that that works is the automatic runoff. So whether or not my favorite can win, as long as I’ve showed a preference, any preference at all between those finalists, my vote will go to the finalists I prefer. Even if my favorite can’t win, it’ll help prevent my worst case scenario, so you’re helping prevent polarizing candidates that are really problematic from winning. And just getting every vote making a difference. That gets you much more broad, representative winners.
Miller: Where is STAR voting being used right now?
Wolk: STAR voting has been used by a number of political parties, and by organizations in the private sector and nonprofit sector over the last decade. STAR voting was invented about 10 years ago. Now it’s being proposed for public municipal elections for the first time. If STAR voting for Eugene passes, Measure 20-349, we’ll be voting on May 21st, then we’re going to implement star voting for those city elections: Mayor, city council.
Miller: And it would be the only municipality in the country that has it?
Wolk: Yeah. Similar things have been done before. Preference voting is not new, score voting is not new. But combining it all in this exact way, we would be first.
Miller: I had mentioned that it sounds to me a little bit like one of those healthcare questionnaires, and you said that sort of more or less rings true with you. As Americans, many of us have experience with a version of this, but not in this context. What do you imagine the learning curve would be, and what kinds of outreach or education would be necessary to have this actually work?
Wolk: Well, a lot of people have heard of ranked choice voting. And it’s similar on the face of things. With ranked choice voting, you’re ranking your candidates, it’s been used around the country and had some real benefits. But there’s been some real pitfalls discovered, especially with the voter experience. So what we found is definitely robust voter education is critical. Our nonprofit, the Equal Vote Coalition, is absolutely committed to partnering with the city and the state, or any jurisdiction that adopts this, to ensure inclusive voter education in multiple languages.
But the magic of STAR voting is that ultimately there’s no wrong way to do it. It’s just a five star rating.
Miller: Is there a wrong way to do any kind of voting? What’s the wrong way to do other kinds of voting right now, whether it’s ranked choice or traditional winner-take-all votes?
Wolk: In ranked choice voting, you rank the candidates first choice, second choice, third choice, fourth choice. If you have 20 candidates, you need to rank them 1 through 20. There’s often limits to how many candidates you can rank. And with a STAR ballot, there’s no limit, because you’re allowed to give equal scores, it scales to any number of candidates. And what we found is that in ranked elections, people often do want to give equal rankings. They’ll say “this is my favorite, these two are kind of tied for my second choice.” And in ranked choice voting that would void your ballot, it makes it uncountable because of the way that the tabulation works. So we’ve seen really high rates of voter error and voided ballots in ranked choice voting, that are absolutely fixed with a better system like STAR voting. And we found that those voter errors do happen statistically at much higher rates for lower income voters, Voters of Color, voters who don’t speak English as a first language.
So it’s really important, if we are gonna go with a more expressive looking ballot, that we have good instructions. But whether or not people do it perfectly in their first try, it’s important that your vote will be able to be counted, it’ll be counted as you intended, and it’s not gonna be something where people are falling through the cracks.
Miller: Meanwhile, ranked choice voting has a real head start in Oregon right now. It’s the way elections are held in Benton County. A version of it is about to be used for the very first time in Portland elections. And the legislature is referring a ranked choice voting measure to Oregonians statewide on the November ballot. Why do you think ranked choice voting is so far ahead right now in terms of use and public support?
Wolk: Well, our current political system really favors electability. People wanna go with the candidate who seems the most electable. And ranked choice voting was invented 150 years ago. It has the name recognition. And not just that, it has an organization behind it, FairVote, that has a coalition that spends hundreds of millions of dollars on ranked choice voting around the country every election cycle. Nevada, for example, just passed ranked choice voting. They’re gonna have to actually vote a whole second time, so that was just phase one. But they spent $23 million to do that. We’re seeing that kind of flood of out of state money in Oregon on ranked choice voting as well.
Meanwhile, Ranked Choice Voting Oregon, our local chapter, I was a member of that in 2016. And we actually did a robust research committee and looked at the different options. We had realized we didn’t have consensus within our own group about what was the best reform. And FairVote told us “if you go with rank choice voting, we’ll fund everything.” But we realized that these talking points “I wanna be able to vote my conscience, I don’t want it to waste my vote,” those were only true if qualified with ranked choice voting. A lot of these claims have been oversold, and there’s a lot of money pushing for this thing that the science is actually showing is problematic in some serious ways. And we can get to that in terms of what does this mean for Oregon if people do vote yes, and what does it mean for Portland as we go into trying to adopt it? Because it’s actually not compatible with Oregon election law, currently.
Miller: Those are issues that we are going to be taking up, I’m sure, as a city and as a state, and on the show in the coming months. But Sara Wolk, we are out of time for this conversation. But thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it.
Wolk: Yeah. Definitely people can learn more at starvoting.org. That’s the website for STAR voting. And equal.vote is the Equal Vote Coalition website. There’s a ton of information here and voters are really gonna need to know to be able to make informed choices on their ballot this year. So definitely encourage everyone to support STAR voting and do that deeper dive.
Miller: Sara Wolk is the executive director of the Equal Vote Coalition and chief petitioner for STAR voting in Eugene.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.