Several local races in Deschutes County are hovering within a few percentage points in the day after Election Day, with ballots still to be counted. But voters were resoundingly clear when it came to the ballot initiative to divide Deschutes County into five voting districts.
More than 62% of local voters opted against Measure 9-185, killing a proposal to create geographic representation in county government in of the state’s fastest-growing areas. Resistance to the new form of County structure was stronger than support for either of the two progressive candidates who led by thousands of votes after election night.
“I was expecting it to be closer,” said Judy Stiegler, a former Democratic state representative from Bend and political science instructor at Central Oregon Community College. “It took a thrashing — a major thrashing.”
Despite the solid rejection, a new set of County leaders who will take over in 2027 say they believe voters might be amenable to districting in the future if the lines were redrawn under a new proposal.
Voters rejected districting despite approving back-to-back reforms to the county commission structure. A 2022 initiative made county commission seats nonpartisan, while a 2024 measure expanded the board from three to five members starting in 2027. All three members of the current board supported the idea of creating districts, but Commissioner Phil Chang, the lone Democrat, objected to the process ushered by Republican counterparts Tony DeBone and Patti Adair. Campaigns for and against the map raised tens of thousands of dollars in the months leading up to the election, with supporters saying it would ensure rural representation and opponents arguing the districts were drawn hastily to favor conservatives as the County grows more blue. Nearly 50 statements in the voters pamphlet argued for and against the proposal.
In May, candidates backed by the local Democrat party secured a majority on the County commission for the first time in decades. After Tuesday’s election, two others appeared poised to join them, which would complete a Democratic sweep of the Deschutes County Commission.
In a phone call Wednesday, DeBone called Tuesday’s election result a “pretty resounding failure” for the map, but said he was confident it was the right move to propose districts to voters after previous reforms.
“What we saw was accusations of gerrymandering and a rigged process,” DeBone said. “There was a partisan spin both ways that just kept escalating. Just not healthy. But that’s the world we live in right now.”
The proposal on the ballot would’ve roughly split Bend — Central Oregon’s largest city and largest concentration of left-leaning voters — into two districts, with other districts roughly covering the Sisters area, the Redmond area and the La Pine and south County area.
Deschutes County Commissioner-elect Rick Russell, a Democrat who helped lead the campaign against the map, said he thought the vote would be closer because the idea of districts might appeal to less-informed voters who hadn’t followed the process.
“It felt like a lot of voters were not aware of this issue until they opened their ballot and read it for the first time,” Russell told the Source in a phone call Wednesday. “I was surprised at what a rejection it was from the community.”
Still, Russell said he thinks the measure failed not because voters didn’t like the idea of districts, but because they felt it would make the board more partisan. Others might’ve voted no because they wanted to maintain a voice in who gets elected to every position on the county commission, not just the one in their district.
He anticipates the new board will be “willing to take a look” at districting again. Meanwhile, advocacy groups are continuing an effort to bring proportional ranked-choice voting to Deschutes County.
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