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A healthy democratic process produces and perpetuates large, organized coalitions. These are usually called political parties, and one of their core functions is to nominate candidates. And so, as the Democratic National Committee prepares for its 2028 presidential primaries, it is considering a ban on ranked-choice voting.

For those who do not understand the process, this has come as a surprise. After all, some states dictate the use of RCV in primary elections, including their presidential primaries. Yet how the DNC uses those results remains up to the DNC itself.

The proposed rule would ignore RCV tabulations and use only first-round results, which are most comparable to the results from states that still use a normal election process. These first-round results are also available more quickly than RCV-adjusted final-round results. There is little that a state like Maine can do to prevent the DNC from implementing its anti-RCV rule.

Maine should learn a lesson here, as the state has taken a bizarre position on how RCV would interact with the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV).

RCV requires centralized counting. You cannot run RCV tabulations in individual precincts or counties without invalidating the system’s own methodology. This is because the local jurisdictions would eliminate different candidates, in different orders, and could have various sets of final candidates. This would produce a mathematically invalid result when final-round data were combined.

And yet, Maine’s RCV supporters insist that other states in the NPV compact would have to use their final-round RCV results to calculate a national result. They have even passed a statute to this effect.

Maine’s law is meaningless, not just because it offends basic mathematics, but because it conflicts with NPV itself. The compact clearly gives each state’s “chief election official” the power to determine what is “an official statement” of the result from every other state. Here is the text:

the chief election official of each member state shall determine the number of votes for each presidential slate in each State of the United States and in the District of Columbia … and shall add such votes together to produce a “national popular vote total” for each presidential slate.

Just as the DNC would for presidential primaries, other NPV compact states would decide how to interpret Maine’s election results. They might use final, RCV-adjusted numbers. Or they might understand basic mathematics and insist on using first-round numbers. Because each compact state would decide on its own, different states might use different numbers and produce different national vote totals.