The Portland teachers union’s all-out effort to ‘cure’ ballots for a school board seat falls just short

The

message

from the Portland Association of Teachers over the past two weeks was clear: Victory for their preferred candidate in the

razor-thin race for the Zone 5 seat

on the Portland Public Schools board was within their grasp.

But to boost 18-year-old Jorge Sanchez Bautista over the finish line, union leaders said, they needed help “curing” about 1,200 ballots that they said had been flagged for missing or non-matching signatures. That was the union’s repeated message to its members and a broad network of volunteers that spans Portland’s most active progressive groups, from the Working Families Party to the Latino Network.

Even City Council Vice President Tiffany Koyama Lane, a former teacher at Sunnyside Elementary, pitched in, soliciting volunteers for the effort to get voters to submit legitimate signatures in

a sun-drenched Instagram video

taken from Waterfront Park, with dragon boats bobbing in the background.

But according to a list generated by the Multnomah County Elections Department — which on Wednesday formally certified the election results in favor of Sanchez Bautista’s opponent, marketing consultant and longtime PPS volunteer Virginia La Forte — there were only 739 ballots available to be cured from within the school district’s boundaries, which is a subset of voters in the county.

In Multnomah County at large, which includes seven other school districts, there were 1,097 ballots eligible for curing, according to the elections division.

Even if volunteers could have tracked down every single one of those 739 voters, a tall ask, and even if 100% of them had voted for Sanchez Bautista, which is statistically virtually impossible, it still would not have been enough to overcome La Forte’s 801 vote edge, though it could have put Sanchez Bautista within automatic recount territory.

In the end, the curing efforts netted Sanchez Bautista an extra 444 votes and La Forte another 325 votes, making the final margin between the two 682 votes, far outside the recount margin, according to results posted late Wednesday by the Multnomah County Elections Office.

Angela Bonilla, the president of the Portland Association of Teachers, initially told The Oregonian/OregonLive via text that when the union told volunteers there were 1,200 challenged ballots that could still have been counted, its staff was looking at “the total number of ballots needing curing for the seat across all three counties.”

A small number of voters in Clackamas and Washington counties live within Portland Public Schools boundaries. Officials at the Washington County Elections Office said Wednesday that it had two ballots available to be cured within Portland Public Schools boundaries; Clackamas County elections officials said it had none.

Bonilla then clarified that the union’s original understanding was that there were 1,550 ballots flagged for curing across the three counties, 700 of which were addressed by voters during a two-week post-election period in which they received notification from their respective counties about missing or non-matching signatures on their ballots.

After that, by June 4, campaigns could receive by-name lists of all voters with remaining uncured ballots and try to contact them until June 10. At that point, Bonilla said, the union’s campaign staffers calculated that “the remaining 850 could yield additional results” to push Sanchez Bautista across the line.

Overall, Bonilla has characterized the election results as a big win for her union, noting that three of its four endorsed candidates won their seats: incumbent Christy Splitt, a government relations coordinator; literacy advocate Rashelle Chase, who ousted incumbent Herman Greene; and youth rights lawyer Stephanie Engelsman.

Engelsman and Splitt faced only token opposition and pulled in across-the-board endorsements from a broad range of organizations and news outlets alike, making their wins more or less a foregone conclusion.

Neither was directly recruited by the union; Splitt, who’d long thought of running, has said she was approached by outgoing board member Andrew Scott, who stepped down from the seat in January, to see if she’d be interested in running for the remainder of his term, while Engelsman decided on her own to jump into her race.

Chase, long a prominent voice of support for teacher perspectives who had considered a previous school board run, was a clear choice to oppose Greene, who has been crosswise with the Portland Association of Teachers since the 2023 strike that closed schools for nearly a month. He ran an under-the-radar campaign with minimal fundraising.

“I spoke with [Chase] towards the end of her deliberation and made it clear we need a champion for our students, someone with experience in education, who understands the complexities of a district and the district’s responsibilities to students,” Bonilla said.

In a concession message posted to social media on Wednesday, Sanchez Bautista offered congratulations to La Forte, said he was proud that the race had come down to the wire and that he would continue to be active in civic life.

In seeking candidates for the Zone 4 and Zone 5 seats, which cover much of North and Northeast Portland, Bonilla said, union representatives visited PTA meetings to explain how to earn the union’s endorsement and encourage attendees to help recruit possible candidates. It was Sanchez Bautista’s idea to run in Zone 5, she said, but he sought support from Bonilla, who was one of his former teachers and with whom he’d worked closely during the 2023 teachers’ strike.

The union was also part of a wider effort to convince district voters to pass the $1.83 billion bond for school construction, modernization and maintenance projects, and a critical financial supporter of the push, said Jeremy Wright, who was a consultant to that campaign. Other supporters included the business community and every school board candidate.

— Julia Silverman covers K-12 education for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com

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