There’s a great debate to have about the Electoral College, whether it should still exist or whether we should amend the Constitution and determine our president through a national popular vote.
Advocates of a national popular vote, though, doubt that they could pass such an amendment, and so they have come up with a shortcut that they find very clever. Here’s the explanation in an syndicated column this week by liberal commentator and Democratic operative Robert Reich:
“We can make the Electoral College irrelevant by getting our states to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. … It could save our democracy. The Compact will guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes nationwide without a constitutional amendment.”
IF TRUMP IS ATTACKED FOR BEING INSUFFICIENTLY PRO WAR HE WILL WIN
Every state that signs the compact by law will assign all of its electors to the winner of “the largest national popular vote total.” The compact only goes into effect when the states signed on add up to a majority of the Electoral College.
To date, a handful of Democratic states have signed, amounting to a total of 196 electoral votes. Democrats took over Michigan and Minnesota last election, and those states are moving toward passing this. Alaska is debating it.
It certainly is a clever mechanism. The underlying argument — that a popular vote makes more sense than the Electoral College — is plausible. But the compact is a horrifically flawed plan, mostly because it rests on a figment of the drafters’ imagination: the “national popular vote total.”
There is no national popular vote. There are state popular votes. Different states count votes different ways, and this compact doesn’t change that. As a result, in a close election, this compact could create unresolvable disputes over who won the “national popular vote.”
Andy Craig at the Cato Institute makes a detailed case that the compact is fatally flawed.
For instance, Maine has recently imposed ranked choice voting, including for president. “Under that system,” Craig writes, “each voter’s one vote can be reassigned to different candidates through multiple rounds of tabulation until one candidate has an absolute majority. The NPVIC does not specify if votes on the first round or the last round should be counted, and either one would defeat the purpose of ranked choice voting.”
This ambiguity could result in different states within the compact having different answers for the “national popular vote” and even different winners. “In a worst‐case scenario, different states in the Compact could make conflicting decisions, throwing the entire scheme into chaos.”
I wonder. Have the cleverest plans of Democratic legislatures ever gone awry?