I was on MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes” yesterday doing my Ancient Mariner harangue in favor of the National Popular Vote, along with Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar, one of the intellectual fathers of that ingenious plan, which would allow us to elect our Presidents the same way we elect governors and senators and everybody else, i.e., the candidate with the most votes wins—and would do it without messing with the Constitution. You can watch the relevant three segments. (One follows another, with unavoidable commercials.)

Akhil and I managed to squeeze in most of our arguments, but right at the end Chris brought up a question we didn’t have time to fully answer: What about recounts? What if Florida 2000 were reproduced on a national scale?

Chris said he finds this a “fairly persuasive” point. “When we kind of cabin things off in one state,” like Ohio, he said,

then at least it’ll just be in Ohio. But if you had a national popular vote that was within a very small, small margin, running a fifty-state recount seems like that would really be chaotic and catastrophic.

I hear this worry a lot, even from people who, like Chris, are supporters of NPV. And, at first, it does seem intuitively troubling. But it’s unwarranted, for many reasons. Here are three.

It’s a wildly far-fetched scenario. The bigger the pool of voters, obviously, the longer the odds of a tie or near tie. If you do the math, extrapolating from the frequency of statewide recounts for offices like governor and senator, you find that the likelihood of a nationwide election that’s anything remotely as close as Florida 2000—not just in absolute numbers (537 votes) or percentagewise (9,492 votes)—is preposterously low. How low? Well, in a national popular-vote election, a disputable result—one close enough to be theoretically reversible via a recount—could be expected to occur at intervals ranging between once every 640 and once every 1,328 years. Those “cabins” are booby-trapped. The status quo doesn’t “cabin off” crises, it creates them. The 2000 election, for example, was not especially close. Gore’s half-million-plus popular-vote majority was bigger than Nixon’s in 1968 and four times the size of Kennedy’s in 1960. The only reason there was a problem in 2000 is that our electoral setup for Presidential elections (and only for Presidential elections) allowed a tiny margin in one state to obliterate a substantial majority in the other forty-nine states (plus D.C.) that was a thousand times greater. The same thing almost happened in 2004, when a 60,000-vote switch in Ohio would have rendered Bush’s 3.5 million-vote national majority moot. A national recount is eminently doable. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the once-in-a-millennium screwup people are worried about happens fairly soon—sometime in the next forty or fifty years, let’s say. Once NPV is in place, of course, reasonably uniform national rules for casting and counting votes in Presidential elections will evolve. But even before that happens, every state is already capable of recounting its own votes in an orderly and timely manner. The process would be a little ragged under the current setup, with its patchwork of slightly different recount procedures in different states, but it would be neither chaotic nor catastrophic.

Historically, by the way, the average number of votes that get changed in a statewide recount is 274. So one can imagine that a national recount might change around 14,000 votes. But of course they wouldn’t all be changed in the same direction. Nationally, such a recount would be closer to a wash than a rout. Even if one candidate somehow managed to net, say, 10,000 additional votes, that would be less than eight per cent of Kennedy’s margin over Nixon in 1960, the closest popular-vote election since 1888, when the electorate was less than one-tenth the size it is now.

We have much bigger dangers to worry about under the status quo—dangers like another “wrong winner” election or a tie in the E.C. The current system is a machine for manufacturing artificial crises. Under state-by-state winner-take-all, there have been five litigated state counts in a mere fifty-six Presidential elections. The current system is not a firewall that helpfully isolates fires, it’s an arsonist itching to burn down the whole neighborhood by torching a single house.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell.