Opinion | An interstate compact on voting could be improved

Americans are gaining experience with ranked-choice voting in local and state elections. In time, these experiences might point the way to reforming the electoral college through a constitutional amendment.

But for tiny margins in a few key states, in 2020, this country would have reelected as president a candidate who lost the popular vote by a wide margin. Change is scary. But so is a status quo capable of producing results that many would regard as illegitimate.

Jason Willick might have identified the key problem with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact: If implemented, it would be inherently unstable because states could exit at any time, except during the six months before the next inauguration. But he missed or overstated other points. The feared shenanigans about selecting electors are problems with the structure of the electoral college, which the compact preserves, not with counting the popular vote. As for using the popular vote to elect the president, his worry over too many candidates producing a small-plurality winner is easily addressed by requiring a majority-vote winner, which is becoming attainable with the advent of instant-runoff voting, particularly ranked-choice voting.

Mr. Willick suggested that the compact could soon reach its threshold for taking effect (member states accounting for at least 270 electoral votes). But this may never occur because the compact will be more sharply scrutinized once its possible adoption becomes tangible rather than still theoretical. Its existential instability might ensure its eventual demise but not before positively mirroring the historic role played by the 20 states and then-territories that gave women the right to vote before the 19th Amendment granted it nationwide.

Helping create the political environment needed to pass an amendment — in this case to finally jettison the electoral college — is no mean achievement.

Rick LaRue, Silver Spring

The writer is the author of “Electoral Structure Matters: Fixing the Creaks and Cracks in the Constitution By Its Quarter Millennium.”

Yes, the convoluted National Popular Vote Interstate Compact could lead to the constitutional and political problems described by Jason Willick, but he overlooked a more dangerous potential outcome of a national popular vote, regardless of the compact. Should there be a close election, there’d be recounts and lawsuits in every precinct in the country. A president would not be determined for months, if not years.

An intermediate step would be to get every state to grant their electoral votes proportionately, as do Nebraska and Maine. This avoids the need to count every single vote precisely, a challenge with provisional ballots, for example. There would be some recounts here and there, but only if the count was close enough to alter an electoral vote and the overall national electoral vote totals were close.

This approach also gets the nation away from focusing only on swing states and forces candidates to compete in all but the reddest or bluest small states. It encourages more people to vote because those in the minority can tilt the electoral vote split more easily than in the winner-take-all approach of today.