One week prior to the May 19 primary election, Multnomah County Democrats Chair Salomé Chimuku hosted a public forum featuring candidates for the nonpartisan Multnomah County Circuit Court positions. All of the candidates running for contested court seats showed up to the May 12 event at PCC’s Climb Center and responded to questions about their values and judicial practices from the chair and members of the audience.

View the candidate forum on the MultDems YouTube channel.

The event marked the first occasion in the Oregon May primary season that all candidates in the contested races appeared together. It is the usual practice of the Multnomah Democrats to promote only the Democrats in a race; however at the request of several of the judicial candidates, invitations were extended to every candidate in this nonpartisan election.

For our audience, we have marked the candidates who are registered Democrats with an asterisk (*) below. Those Democrats who submitted answers to our candidates questionnaires are linked to their candidates profiles. We do not endorse candidates in primary races.

The full Your Courts, Your Vote Judicial Candidates Forum video stream is available from the MultDems YouTube streams page. It is available now. (Video will be updated with a title slide for ID purposes shortly).

The participating candidates were:

Position 2

• Chris Behre*
• Juliet Britton*
• Anit Jindal*
• Laura Maurer Rowan*
• Diane S. Sykes*

Position 5

• John Casalino*
• Joanna T. Perini-Abbott*

Position 12

• Adrian Brown*
• Peter Klym*

Position 14

• Elizabeth Savage*
• Kristine Almquist*
• Heidi Brown* (virtual attendee)
• Joseph Hagedorn*
• Michael Lee

And, thanks to our volunteers at the event!

REMINDER

Ballots are due May 19 at 8 PM. Drop boxes are open now. Look up a dropbox near you using this Ballot Drop Site locator tool. Visit our 2026 Election Hub for candidate profiles and other primary election information.