[EL] "Chaos" Under NPV Compact?

[Steven John Mulroy (smulroy)]

Responding to Justin Levitt's query re: criticisms of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, Sean Parnell writes:

"It's no big deal for Oregon to determine Oregon's electors based on Oregon's laws (which, for example, require that a mailed-in ballot be received by the elections office by election day in order to count) and Oregon voters, but now that Oregon's electors are also going to be decided by Washington's voters as well (which only requires the ballot be postmarked by election day), you've got no shortage of legal claims about disenfranchisement and the like. Now do this for every state.

"Also, the fact that the fourth most populous state in the union seems to be unable to put the right vote tally on the piece of paper that NPV says will be the official source of vote totals seems problematic." 

Respectfully, I think there's another perspective here.  If we currently allow each state to have different rules re: counting votes for purposes of the Electoral College, I don't see why the NPV Compact couldn't just continue to do so. An NPV  Compact state promises to allocate all its Electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote, using the existing rules of each state.   There may be litigation over that, like there is over any electoral reform, but I don't see how such claims would have much merit. The fact that a particular state or states voluntarily decides to award its Electors to the national winner, as opposed to its intra-state winner, doesn't automatically require nationwide uniformity in rules re such details as mail-in ballots. 

And, if there were errors in a particular state's Certificate of Ascertainment (like there were in NY), such errors are far less likely to be outcome-determinative nationwide than they are within that state.   Either these errors will be detected and corrected using existing procedures, as they are now,; or they are too small to be outcome-determinative in the state in question.  If the latter, it is unlikely they'd be large enough to change the national election outcome.  Rather than multiplying Florida 2000 Bush v. Gore-style debacles, the Compact would reduce their likelihood.