Guest view: Ranked choice voting makes a National Popular Vote impossible

A few Pennsylvania state legislators want to use the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) to nullify the electoral college. The plan sounds simple: Pennsylvania and other compact states will ignore their own voters and instead appoint presidential electors for the candidate deemed to have won the most popular votes nationwide. Yet it may all fall apart as state election law changes make it impossible to determine the popular vote count.

The national count is already harder to determine than NPVIC advocates claim, at least in a close election. Each state runs its own elections, determining who votes, how votes are cast and counted, when and how recounts are conducted, and how results are reported. This is a problem for NPVIC — historians still argue over who really won the most popular votes in 1960, for example. But larger challenges are on the horizon due to some states adopting an election process known as Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). 

Under RCV, voters can rank all of the candidates in order of preference. If one candidate receives a majority of first place votes, that candidate wins. If no candidate is ranked first by a majority then the last-place candidate is eliminated and voters who picked that candidate as their first choice have their votes counted for their second choice. The process continues until a candidate has a majority. At least two states, Alaska and Maine, plan to use RCV in their 2024 presidential election.

A major problem for determining a national popular vote winner is that there is no obvious and indisputable way for states that use RCV to report their results. They might report only the initial count, before votes for the lowest-ranked candidates are eliminated, or they can report only the final count, after votes have been erased for some candidates and added to others. Maine did not use RCV in 2016, but if it had there would have been about a 55,000 vote difference between the initial and final numbers.

An RCV state might report both sets of numbers, creating confusion and even conflict among NPVIC states over which number to use. 

In a presidential election, RCV could literally erase hundreds of thousands or even millions of votes for major party candidates if there is a strong third-party or independent candidate (which would be more common under the NPVIC). Any state with RCV where the Democrat or Republican finished in third place would re-allocate votes from the third-place finisher to the top two candidates. In 1992 at least 390,000 votes have been erased in just those two states if RCV had been in place at the time. 

The NPVIC assumes member states will have uniform and consistent vote totals from every other state in order to declare a winner. But in a close election like those in 1960, 1968, or 2000, just a few RCV states could add or subtract hundreds of thousands of votes from various candidates. All this is a recipe for a political and constitutional catastrophe. 

Sean Parnell is senior legislative director for Save Our States, an organization dedicated to defending the Electoral College. He can be reached at sean@saveourstates.com.