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One of the many disputes over the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV) involves Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) and how vote totals from states using it would be added into national vote counts. For years, many others and I have argued that because the compact does not provide any guidance, the chief election officials in NPV member states will be free to choose either first- or final-round vote counts, or even intermediate rounds. 

Lobbyists for NPV get very upset about this. I won’t rehash their arguments here, but the short version is that they insist only the final-round vote totals will be used. 

Even if they are correct, this still opens a massive vulnerability in the compact that Alaska—or any state where one party is dominant—could exploit. A pair of election experts explained this in their 2024 paper, “The National Popular Vote (NPV) Proposal for U.S. Presidential Elections Undermines Election Integrity.” 

The danger for NPV arises when states using RCV decide how to end that process. In some systems, such as in Washington D.C., the RCV process of eliminating last-place candidates and assigning their votes to other candidates stops as soon as one candidate has a majority, regardless of how many candidates remain. Elsewhere, they run the process until only two candidates remain, even if one gets a majority in an earlier round; this is how Alaska and Maine do it. Neither choice alters the outcome, but would change the reported vote totals. 

Another option, which would change the totals dramatically, would be to run the RCV process until only a single candidate remained. Here again, this would not affect the outcome within that state. But if NPV was in effect, it could definitely affect the outcome nationwide. 

Think about what would happen if Alaska decided to run the RCV process until only a single candidate remained. Suppose in 2028 about 350,000 people vote and the Alaska results look about like they did in 1992—40% for the Republican, 30% for the Democrat, 28% for an independent, and a handful of third-party candidates with the remaining 2%. Then after the third-party and independent candidates are eliminated the results are 60% for the Republican and 40% for the Democrat, or 210,000 to 140,000. 

Under Alaska’s current system, the RCV process is done, and those are the vote totals reported. But if the state decided to continue the process until only a single candidate remained, the final results will show the Republican with 210,000-plus votes while the Democrat’s vote total drops to zero. 

In a close election held with NPV in effect, 140,000 votes disappearing from the national tally could decide the outcome. 

Now, most elections aren’t going to have a strong third-party or independent candidate preventing a Republican from winning a majority in Alaska in the first round (though Trump got just 51% in 2016). But if the state made one additional tweak, requiring that the RCV process be used in presidential elections even if there is a first-round winner, it would ensure that in every election, one presidential candidate receives the majority of votes cast while the remaining candidates receive zero votes in the final round.

Alaska currently has RCV, so making this change could be easily done by statute. Other states run by one party could also establish RCV solely for presidential elections, require the process be used even if there is a first-round majority winner, and run it down to the final candidate. Tennessee could have erased more than a million votes for Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 if it used this process.

As I mentioned earlier, I think NPV’s lobbyists are wrong about compact member states being required to use final-round results. But even if I’m right, this vulnerability remains because different chief election officials in different member states can pick which totals to use when tabulating the national count. It’s not hard to see the partisan games that could be played, with Republican officials picking the final results and Democratic officials picking initial- or penultimate-round results and declaring different winners. Lawsuits would surely follow, though it isn’t clear what if anything could be done—it’s not illegal for a non-member state to run its presidential election in a way that poses difficulties for states in the compact. What a mess.

The assumptions by NPV’s lobbyists and advocates from the very start have been that adding votes across state lines is easy, the compact is perfect, and there’s nothing a state opposed to it could do to resist or complicate its operation. The fact that Alaska could easily erase 140,000 votes for the Democratic candidate by a simple statutory tweak to its RCV system shows that this isn’t the case and that NPV is highly vulnerable to non-member states’ efforts to derail it.