It might sound appealing that the winner of the national popular vote wins the election.
However, in a very close election, it’s not always clear who that is.
On election night 2000, Bush was ahead by about a million popular votes nationwide.
By the Wednesday afternoon, the day after election day, Gore was ahead nationwide by about 500,000 popular votes. That’s a razor thin margin, percentagewise, over the whole country.
In the 2000 election, a national recount would have been needed to verify who really won the national popular vote. Until that is done, you couldn’t even get to the electoral vote under these NPV proposals.
Ditto in 1960, Kennedy vs. Nixon. Officially Kennedy won the popular vote by about 100,000+ votes nationwide. But there too, if such a system were in place then, you would need a national recount. Who is going to supervise that, who would pay for that?
What I mean is simply to allocate a state’s EV by Congressional district, then award the 2 Senate votes to the state as a whole.
Say in CA (using pre-2010 numbers), McCain would have won 23 of the 53 House districts, and of course Obama won the state overall. In that example, CA’s EV’s would be as such:
McCain 23
Obama 22
Recounts are far more likely in the current system of state-by-state winner-take-all methods.
The possibility of recounts should not even be a consideration in debating the merits of a national popular vote. No one has ever suggested that the possibility of a recount constitutes a valid reason why state governors or U.S. Senators, for example, should not be elected by a popular vote.
The question of recounts comes to mind in connection with presidential elections only because the current system so frequently creates artificial crises and unnecessary disputes.
A nationwide recount would not happen. We do and would vote state by state. Each state manages its own election and recount. The state-by-state winner-take-all system is not a firewall, but instead causes unnecessary fires.
Given that there is a recount only once in about 160 statewide elections, and given there is a presidential election once every four years, one would expect a recount about once in 640 years under the National Popular Vote approach. The actual probability of a close national election would be even less than that because recounts are less likely with larger pools of votes.
The average change in the margin of victory as a result of a statewide recount was a mere 296 votes in a 10-year study of 2,884 elections.
No recount would have been warranted in any of the nation’s 56 previous presidential elections if the outcome had been based on the nationwide count.
The common nationwide date for meeting of the Electoral College has been set by federal law as the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. Under both the current system and the National Popular Vote approach, all counting, recounting, and judicial proceedings must be conducted so as to reach a “final determination” prior to the meeting of the Electoral College. In particular, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that the states are expected to make their “final determination” six days before the Electoral College meets.
I hate to simply restate what I already wrote in the post. But it's the only answer I can give you. There is no national election infrastructure, and the NPV compact would not change that. There is simply no effect a close national popular vote would have upon any state's recount process. Recounts, like the rest of the electoral process, are a function of state government. They are triggered according to state statute. For those states which have automatic recounts in close races, the race would have to be close within the state, not nationally.