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In April, the Rhode Island House of Representatives Committee on State Government & Elections held a hearing for a bipartisan bill to repeal the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV). I provided written testimony but was unable to attend. A lobbyist for NPV, Chris Pearson, showed up and testified, making some very dubious claims (archived video of the hearing is here). 

In this first of three blog posts, I’ll review—and debunk—the mistaken and misleading statements made by NPV’s lobbyist. First up: recounts, about which Mr. Pearson had a great deal to say but not much that was accurate.

A key defect of NPV is that it would be impossible to conduct a national recount. This is because every state has different thresholds for whether a recount is required or allowed. Even if the national margin is very narrow, the margin in many states would still be quite large. For example, in 1960 when the national margin between Kennedy and Nixon was either 0.17% or 0.09% (depending on how one interprets Alabama’s popular votes that year), the margin was less than 1% in only six states.

Pearson falsely asserted “it’s all but impossible to get a recount today in presidential elections,” even claiming “there was no recount in 2000” in Florida and “two out of the three recounts requested since then have not happened.”

The most obvious falsehood is that there was a recount in Florida, conducted by machine and completed on November 10, 2000. What was not conducted was a requested second recount. Reasonable and smart people disagree on the legal arguments related to that second recount, but it’s false that there was no recount in Florida in 2000.

As for “two out of the three recounts,” it’s not entirely clear what he’s referring to but I suspect it’s the 2004, 2016, and 2020 elections. It would take a much longer post to go through each in detail, but Pearson ignores that the margins in most of the “battleground” states in those elections were well above the threshold to trigger a recount. For example, John Kerry lost Ohio by more than 2% in 2004, and Donald Trump lost Michigan and Nevada by more than 2% and Pennsylvania by more than 1% in 2020. And there were recounts in Wisconsin (2016 and 2020) and in Georgia (2024). In 2016, Hillary Clinton could have but didn’t request recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Clearly it’s not “all but impossible” to get a recount when one is warranted. But with the Electoral College working as designed, what matters is the margin in each state. Recounts are governed by states, and so they work with the current Electoral College process—but would not work with NPV’s concocted national election. 

Pearson also claimed “…under National Popular Vote, logistically you could handle recounts…” and even claimed that getting lawyers and judges involved would be a thing of the past. It’s not clear what he means by “logistically” because, as I’ve already described, it would be impossible to have a national recount because every state’s recount laws are different and were written for in-state margins, not a national tally. A paper I wrote more than a year ago found that, depending on how state officials and courts decide to interpret and apply their recount laws, between 25 and 61 percent of all ballots could not be included in any “national” recount. 

And contrary to Pearson’s claim, there would definitely be “lawyers and judges” involved in deciding how to interpret and apply each state’s recount laws and rules under NPV. The biggest decision courts would have to make is whether the national margin or the in-state margin would be used to determine whether a recount is even allowed. There is certainly no reason to expect different courts, looking at different laws in different states, to come to uniform conclusions.

NPV’s lobbyists are very sensitive about the recount issue, as they should be—it’s a major concern expressed by state legislators. The fact that they can’t provide accurate and honest responses to the issue raises even more red flags. And it reflects the fact that NPV does not actually create a national popular vote.