Portland's police-staffing ballot measure is dead, at least for now.
The city's Elections Division announced Tuesday, Aug. 4, that Initiative Petition 1PDX2026, dubbed the "Portland Enhanced Community Safety Initiative," fell 6,307 signatures short of the 40,437 needed to reach the Nov. 3 ballot. The petition gathered just 34,130 valid signatures out of 63,315 submitted, according to the final determination from the City Auditor's office.
The Portland Police Association, which bankrolled the effort with nearly $800,000 of the campaign's $1.4 million war chest, immediately pledged to sue.
"On behalf of disenfranchised Portland voters, we intend to file legal action challenging this decision and process," PPA president Aaron Schmautz said in a statement reported by Willamette Week.
Why so many signatures failed
Only 61% of sampled signatures were valid. More than 70% of rejected signatures came from people who were not registered voters or did not live in Portland, according to Portland City Elections manager Deborah Scroggin.
Duplicates and triplicates knocked another 1,994 signatures from the count, lowering the validity rate by 3.57 percentage points.
Before sampling even began, the city rejected 8,426 signature lines during pre-processing. More than half were blank or struck out by petitioners themselves. The remainder failed because of altered lines, improper circulator certifications or unapproved petition sheets.
At the 61% validity rate, the petition would have failed even if all 63,315 submitted signatures had gone to sampling, the elections office noted.
The Oregon Secretary of State's office had separately received 97 formal complaints alleging canvassers misled people about what they were signing.
A contentious path
The measure would have diverted 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund, a surcharge on large retailers that raised about $167 million last fiscal year, to hire roughly 400 additional officers and require a staffing ratio of two sworn officers per 1,000 residents. Portland currently sits at about 1.2 per 1,000.
The first signature sample failed on July 29. A second sample also fell short, leading to Tuesday's final call.
Throughout the process, Safer Portland alleged city elections officials were politically biased against law enforcement. City Auditor Simone Rede pushed back in a written statement on July 29, when the first sample failed: "Portlanders deserve a final determination based on the law and the evidence, not speculation or demands for a preferred outcome."
What comes next for police staffing
The measure's failure leaves Portland's police-staffing debate where it was. The bureau had 813 sworn members as of its 2025 annual report, hired 72 that year and achieved a net gain of 27 officers, with 1,801 applications, the highest since 2020.
City Council passed a $10 million supplemental package on July 22 to preserve 30 public safety jobs and restore some planned cuts. The adopted 2026-27 budget cut $21 million from PPB materials, services and programs but kept all officers and investigators on the job.
The announcement landed on a grim day. A man was found fatally shot in a vehicle that had crashed into a building in the 4000 block of South Macadam Avenue around 4:10 a.m. Tuesday, according to PPB.
That homicide came two days after 18-year-old Terrell J. Granberg was killed and five others wounded at a Cully neighborhood house party, where investigators recovered more than 75 shell casings. No arrests have been made in either case.
No court filing date for the PPA's promised lawsuit has been announced.
