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Interstate compacts are common, but the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV) is different from all the others—and not just because it attempts to unravel the checks and balances in the Electoral College. I wrote recently about how NPV, unlike every other compact, relies on cooperation from “all of the other states, including those not in the compact.”

Yet there is another oddity of NPV that could upend the plan. Most multilateral compacts create a process to resolve differences between the member states. This is true of occupational licensing compacts, which create reciprocity among member states for licensed jobs like nurses and massage therapists. These compacts set up a process (usually a commission) to establish uniform interpretations, make future adjustments, and settle disagreements. 

So how does the NPV compact address such concerns? It doesn’t.

The NPV compact fails to establish a commission or any other process to ensure that member states share the same interpretations of its provisions, let alone come to the same conclusions about election results.

The problems are not hypothetical. Here are four recent events of the type that would interfere with creating timely and accurate national vote totals.

1. New York has often failed to count all its presidential votes on time—it had about 415,000 ballots remaining when it certified its 2012 presidential results.
2. California in 2016 reported every vote for Trump as a vote for both the Republican electors and a third-party slate of electors, doubling Trump’s popular votes in the state’s official results.
3. In 2024, presidential results in West Virginia were not certified until a week after the deadline.
4. Alaska and Maine have adopted ranked-choice voting for presidential electors, which produces two different sets of vote totals: first-round results and final, RCV-adjusted results.

None of these situations became a major problem when results were contained within each state. But NPV relies on every state in the compact getting data from every other state. NPV lobbyists claim none of this matters because states in the compact are forced to accept incomplete or inaccurate results from other states, so long as they are “official.”

This would, at least, lead to lawsuits. Must a state really use inaccurate totals from other states? What is the remedy if votes are counted past the deadline? Would NPV states just accept California’s mistaken certificate of ascertainment? But then what legal grounds would they have to reject the double-counted Trump votes? And if NPV states can reject mistakes, how far does that power go?

Sometimes there are competing “official” results to choose from, as is the case with ranked-choice voting. In this situation, the choices made by election officials in NPV states could determine who becomes president.

Consider the 1992 election, when independent candidate Ross Perot came in second in two states, knocking a major party candidate into third. Should such a scenario happen in a state with RCV, the third-place major party candidates might have millions of votes in the first-round that would be eliminated—reduced to zero—in the final, RCV-adjusted results. Choosing the first or last set of numbers could change the national outcome. 

The NPV compact doesn’t attempt to answer these questions, or to create a unified way to answer them in the future. Instead, it leaves everything to the chief election official in each compact state, and then to state and federal judges. This could result in a patchwork of interpretations, with NPV states producing different or even conflicting national results.

Other interstate compacts, like the one governing massage therapist licensing, anticipate and seek to resolve differences among the states that join. The massage therapy interstate compact establishes a commission to provide uniformity and deal with disagreements. Which raises the question: Is licensing masseuses really more important than electing presidents?