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I have written several posts about one of many problems with the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV), that states’ official, certified vote totals may not be available to compact states in time for them to certify their own versions of national totals.

It is worth noting that we at Save Our States aren’t the only ones who have identified this problem. In fact, the folks at a group called Making Every Vote Count (MEVC) explained this same issue back in 2019. 

MEVC is a group that shares NPV’s dislike of the Electoral College and has advocated for an alternative to NPV called the Voter Choice Ballot that also would work through state legislation, but in individual states rather than through a collection of states in a compact. 

Back in 2019 an attorney working for MEVC, Matthew Shapanka, gave a presentation titled “Be Prepared: If the national popular vote chooses the president, who decides who won?” to the elections committee of the National Association of Secretaries of State. The slides that accompanied the presentation explain the problem:

• “If Compact Effective, State Officials Must Conduct Count in Parallel”
• Under the current process, “officials send vote totals and appoint electors in the same document”
• Under the compact process, “states cannot appoint electors until after officials determine who won the national popular vote”

The text on the slides is a little abstract (presumably the spoken commentary accompanying the slides made it more clear), but it outlines the same issue as my earlier posts: compact members have to get official vote totals from non-member states before they can determine the winner and appoint their electors, but those member states have no way of getting non-member states’ “document” (the Certificate of Ascertainment) before those member states have to tally the national vote, determine a winner, and appoint their own electors. 

It’s a classic chicken-or-the-egg dilemma.

Shapanka didn’t just recognize the problem, he suggested that every state’s chief election official – usually the Secretary of State – split their Certificate of Ascertainment into two distinct documents that would be sent separately to the Archivist of the United States. The first certificate would be sent the Wednesday before the Electoral College meets and would contain only the vote totals for each presidential ticket. The Archivist would then make those vote totals public by Friday allowing NPV member states to use them to tabulate the national vote. They could then appoint their electors and transmit the second certificate with their presidential electors’ names.

There’s a few challenges to what Shapanka proposes – obviously there would need to be a change in federal law to create two different certificates, as well as adjustments to the timeline. It is also worth noting that the transmission of these certificates is not instantaneous, because they are physical documents that typically take a day or two to make their way to the Archivist, so the two-day turnaround would remain problematic. But at least he recognized the problem and is thinking about how to solve it, which puts him well ahead of NPV’s lobbyists or anyone else in their organization.