Popular Vote Compact Collides With Ranked-choice Voting
In their never-ending quest to remake American elections, two “progressive” reforms have come into conflict. Ranked-choice voting is one, with two states set to use it for presidential elections and a few others considering it. Meanwhile, many blue states have joined the National Popular Vote interstate compact in an attempt to nullify the Electoral College.
The problem is that ranked-choice voting makes nonsense of the popular vote plan.
For the last 17 years, the California-based National Popular Vote campaign has lobbied states to join its eponymous interstate compact. They claim there are no limits on what legislatures can do with state electoral votes. The compact would have states ignore their own voters and instead choose presidential electors based on the nationwide popular vote. The effort is led by a frustrated Al Gore elector.
The NPV compact takes effect if joined by states that control at least 270 electoral votes combined, and thus the outcome of presidential elections. So far, 16 states with 205 electoral votes have joined. While there is no prospect of it taking effect in 2024, the NPV campaign is promising to have the compact in place by 2028.
Meanwhile, another group of progressive reformers is lobbying states to adopt ranked-choice voting. This complex system allows voters to rank candidates by preference. If no candidate has a majority after counting the first-preference votes, then the least popular candidate is eliminated, and his or her voters have their next-preference counted. The only limit to the number of rounds of counting is the number of candidates in the race.
Two states—Alaska and Maine—will use ranked-choice voting to choose presidential electors this year. Other states are considering similar proposals. According to Ballotpedia, there were about 150 bills related to ranked-choice voting in state legislatures last year (although not all would apply to presidential elections).
I work with groups that oppose both RCV and NPV. Yet I never expected them to come into conflict.
The easy answer for a state using ranked-choice voting, should NPV take effect, is to stop. That would ensure the state has a single election result that is compatible with other states. Otherwise, there would be results from each round of RCV counting, and these could be wildly different as some candidates are eliminated and their votes redistributed to other candidates.
Whatever RCV states try to do, the real power is in each NPV state. The compact relies on the chief election official in each NPV state to determine national results. Those officials could simply ignore ranked-choice adjustments and use only the first-preference votes, since those are more comparable to ordinary votes in other states.
The one thing that should never be done is to combine RCV-adjusted totals. Doing that is similar to the basic mathematical mistake of adding percentages—it produces a meaningless result. Advocates for RCV admit this in other contexts. The Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center notes that “ballot data needs to be centralized” to conduct an RCV election. Precincts cannot independently conduct the RCV process and then aggregate final-round results. What’s true for precincts is also true for states.
But NPV lobbyists are rejecting math and insisting that states can combine ranked-choice voting results with other states’ results to determine a national popular vote winner. They even convinced Maine to pass a law telling NPV states to use their adjusted numbers.
Because democratic elections are based on simple addition, rejecting math puts democracy at risk. Combining adjusted vote totals destroys the premise of a national popular vote.
It might not be an issue of just a few votes, either. Consider what happened in Maine in the 1992 presidential election, when Bill Clinton came in first and independent candidate Ross Perot edged out George H.W. Bush for second. Perot received 206,820 popular votes while Bush received 206,504. Had RCV been in effect, Bush would have been eliminated and his vote total reduced to zero. If his supporters ranked other candidates, their votes would have been redistributed; if not, their ballots would be ignored.
Now consider a hypothetical future election with the NPV compact in effect and one or more large states using RCV. An independent candidate’s second-place finish in just one state could delete millions of votes for a major party candidate and even flip the outcome.
Whatever that is, it is not a national popular vote. And while these scenarios may not happen often, any combination of adjusted vote totals is mathematically meaningless.
Like it or not, there is logic to our current presidential election process. Opponents of the Electoral College may dislike its two-step democracy. But at each level it is, in fact, democratic. There is no logic that supports a mashup of ranked-choice voting and the NPV compact—only politics.
Trent England is the founder and executive director of Save Our States and cochair of the Stop RCV Coalition.
