G. Alan Tarr: Five common misconceptions about the Electoral College

In this way, the NPV retains the constitutional device of the Electoral College but also moves the country closer to a less convoluted national vote. As a policy matter, the NPV helps address the two biggest criticisms of the status quo. The first criticism is that the current system does not respect the one-voter, one-vote principle, because voters across the country don’t have an equal voice in selecting a president. The second is that the margin of victory or loss within a state is irrelevant, given nearly every state’s winner-take-all approach to allocating presidential electors, so presidential campaigns are not national at all. Instead, they are focused on a handful (anywhere from four to eight) of reasonably sized “swing” states where the median voter is in play.

The NPV could really work, and I’ve been writing and talking about it (or some variant of it) since 2001, when my brother (and fellow law professor) Akhil Amar and I—and, separately, another law professor, Robert Bennett—laid out the plan’s intellectual foundations. Twenty years ago, probably only a few people expected states to act on these ideas. But now, thanks in large part to an organization headed by the Stanford mathematician John Koza, the plan is moving forward.

Of course, there are critics. Some people oppose the NPV because they think it will lead to more third-party candidacies. Leaving aside for the moment whether third-party candidacies are undesirable in the first place, there’s no reason to think the NPV would increase them. All states—even large states like California, Texas, and Florida—use the popular vote, rather than a state-level electoral college, to determine gubernatorial races, yet meaningful third-party candidacies are no more common in governors’ races than in presidential contests.

Nor is the NPV likely to cause insurmountable recount difficulties; large states handle recounts regularly, and so could the nation. Moreover, often (as in 2000), the national-vote winner will be clear despite claims that vote counts in particular states are flawed. Indeed, an NPV system makes recounts less likely in the first place, as elections would not turn on a handful of close calls. For example, the 2000 Florida recount would have been irrelevant, since no one denies that Al Gore had more votes nationally than George W. Bush no matter what the exact outcome in Florida was.

But while the plan is a smart one, there is always a risk of unforeseen and undesirable collateral consequences. The Electoral College, though far from perfect, has served the nation reasonably well, and change always brings the risk of glitches. This is why the details about how to implement the NPV matter greatly, and why I’ve advocated for what I call a “deferred-implementation approach.” Such a strategy would mean that the NPV would not go into effect until three presidential election cycles after the requisite number of states had signed on to it, which would give Congress enough time to figure out how to patch any holes in the plan.