A new proposal to create districts in central Oregon's Deschutes County illustrates all the flaws of the winner-take-all election model that predominates in Cascadia and beyond. It's also a case study of how much better our elections could be.
The Deschutes County Board of Commissioners recently proposed switching the county's election method from at-large numbered seats to single-member districts. The board-appointed committee tasked with drafting a possible district map, however, ran into a number of challenges in fulfilling its charge, including outdated data, unequal puzzle pieces, and a lot of concern over partisanship. In an increasingly liberal area, the conservative-majority committee ended up with a map that favors Republican voters.
Unfortunately, the current at-large winner-take-all model also fails to provide reliable representation for both majority and minority viewpoints.
But there's another solution that offers consistent representation for people of all groups, whether based on neighborhood, party, or another unifying factor: proportional representation.
Drawing districts inevitably brings up the specter of gerrymandering, but mapmakers didn't have to gerrymander to prove that districts are a poor solution to the problem of how to best represent county residents. It's difficult to draw districts fairly, and any mapmaking committee will trade some criteria for others.
Deschutes County currently elects county commissioners to numbered at-large positions in staggered terms. County board seats were partisan positions for most of Deschutes's history, but in 2022 voters approved a switch to nonpartisan elections, effective in 2024. Then in 2024, voters increased the number of commissioners from three to five, effective in 2026.
After the expansion proposal passed in 2024, the board of commissioners proposed an additional modification: abandoning the at-large numbered seats in favor of five geographic districts. Commissioners appointed a District Mapping Advisory Committee (DMAC) to draft a district map and set guidelines for the task. In early December 2025, DMAC proposed a five-district map to the county board, which appears likely to offer it to voters for approval in May or possibly November 2026.
The board may have tried its best to create a fair process. The problem? Bias is hard to escape.
The current board of county commissioners leans right. Tony DeBone and Patti Adair are Republicans, elected in 2022, before elections were nonpartisan; Phil Chang, the third member, was elected in 2020 as a Democrat and then reelected in 2024 in the technically nonpartisan race. These three commissioners appointed DMAC's seven members. DeBone and Adair each selected two members and Chang chose three, so the majority of the committee owed its seats to the conservative commissioners.
And the proposed map, with districts A through E, favors conservative voters.
In the 2020 presidential election, 53 percent of Deschutes County voters chose the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden. The same proportion selected Kamala Harris for president in 2024.
Yet under the proposed district plan, three of the five districts would reliably vote conservative, constructing a conservative-majority board of commissioners, contrary to the partisan leanings of county voters. Based on the precinct breakdown of the 2024 presidential results, more voters in proposed districts A, C, and E chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris; the opposite is true in districts B and D.
Sometimes local elections contradict trends displayed in national races, when county candidates connect with voters on day-to-day issues and national partisan platforms hold less sway. Not so in Deschutes. For instance, in 2020, when Democrat Chang won his countywide seat with 53 percent of the vote, he would have lost in the same three conservative districts.
The same trend holds in voter registrations. In November 2025, as in every month since early 2020, the county saw more Democratic re...