AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The Alaska Senate race is now the only Senate race yet to be called. Democratic challenger Mary Peltola is narrowly leading Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan with about 86% of the votes counted. The close race has drawn controversy because of a second candidate also named Dan Sullivan, retired teacher Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., who’s also on the ballot.

Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, a system where voters choose not only their top candidate, but can also indicate an order of preference for remaining candidates on the ballot. If no candidate wins a majority as the top choice, then second-choice votes are added to the totals and so on until there is a winner.

AMY GOODMAN: Alaska and Maine use ranked-choice voting for statewide elections, and it’s also used in 36 cities and three counties nationwide. And it’s popular outside of politics. The Oscar for Best Picture is decided by ranked-choice voting. So, how might ranked-choice voting impact the results in Alaska?

Our next guest is an expert on voting reforms, including ranked-choice voting. Rob Richie is with us, president and founder of Expand Democracy, a senior adviser with FairVote.

Let’s start in this first few minutes explaining how Alaska votes. Explain ranked-choice voting. And does it have anything to do with the fact that we don’t know who’s won the Alaska Senate race?

ROB RICHIE: Thank you, Amy. Great to be here, and fun to talk about ranked-choice voting in such a prominent way. It is the last Senate race to be decided.

The delay is entirely due to the fact that it’s a very rural state. Mail takes a while to get to where it needs to go, and they create space for ballots to come late. And so, that’s what we’re waiting for. It’s just ballots to be processed. All the ballots that have been processed, those 86%, have actually been — the data has been provided, so we can see what ranked-choice voting does with those ballots. And so, it is just waiting to see what happens. So, here’s what — or, those ballots to be processed.

So, ranked-choice voting is one way to think about it. Anytime you’ve wanted to vote for a third party or an independent candidate, you’re in that position of saying, “Well, if I vote for that person and they can’t win, am I just throwing my vote away? Should I vote for my lesser of two evils?” In a ranked-choice system, you can say, “Well, here’s my first choice. That’s what I really want to say, and that’s why I want to support. Maybe that person wins. But if they lose, if they’re in last place, I want my ballot to go to this second choice.” And that’s the instant runoff.

One of the places they used it is New York City in the the primaries. And when Andrew Cuomo was the big front-runner and Mamdani was sort of rising, there were several people that he was aligned with, like Brad Lander, and they could run actually kind of as a team and say, “Well, vote for me first, and vote for you second.” And it’s a system that kind of promotes reaching out, engaging, and for voters, a lot of freedom.

Getting back to Alaska, there are different races that are still being decided. The governor’s race, where it looks like Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, the Democrat, is nearly at 50%, far ahead of three Republicans. And while ranked-choice voting will make that closer, because the Republican vote will consolidate, he will still very, very certainly win.

Then there’s a House race where the Republican incumbent is ahead by about eight points with the current ballots. There’s an independent who is second. And by the way, it looks like maybe 20% of the Alaska House will end up being independent. But anyway, the independent is second. And then there’s a Democrat, actually kind of a quirky candidacy because he doesn’t live in the state, is in third. His vote will make that closer for the independent, because those votes generally will go to the independent over the Republican, probably not turn the tide.

And then, in the Peltola race, yeah, the famous decoy Dan Sullivan, who was recruited in kind of an ignominious way to run and, you know, triggered Donald Trump and the DOJ, interestingly, when you look at his second choices, the people that vote for that candidate, they go more to Peltola than to Dan Sullivan, the incumbent Republican. And that’s because everyone sort of knew which was which, and it’s kind of protest voters. And it’s only like 1.5% of the electorate. There’s another Republican with maybe two-and-a-half percent. His votes will more go to Sullivan. So, overall, ranked-choice voting makes it a little closer in the Senate race. But the final part of this is the remaining ballots are expected to widen Peltola’s first-choice lead, maybe even put her over 50%, and she’s heavily favored to win at this point.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Rob, can you also talk about how Democrats’ big wins at the state level in the midterms could potentially lead to the end of the Electoral College in future presidential elections? And explain to us what the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is.

ROB RICHIE: It’s really exciting seeing these moving in tandem. Ranked-choice voting is spreading to more places, and the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is on the cusp of winning. We could have a 2028 presidential election decided by a national popular vote, where my vote in Maryland and your votes in New York and all listeners’ votes, wherever they are, count the same, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Like, that’s the way we elect all our governors and most everything else, and that is within reach.

So, currently — so, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a state agreement, grounded in the Constitution. The Constitution gives states certain powers, and one is that they can go into a binding agreement with other states. So, they have an interstate compact power. Things like the Port Authority and D.C. Metro system, that is a compact among the other jurisdictions. So, that’s a power that states can do.

And they have plenary control over their electoral votes. So, we know that the Electoral College is in the Constitution, but the mechanism of how states allocate electors is not in the Constitution. And the fact that currently almost every state gives all of their electoral votes to the popular vote winner in that state is really like almost game theory. Every state’s trying to maximize its support for its favored candidate. But they’re kind of all stuck in a situation where 40 states just don’t matter in every presidential election, and that includes almost — the great majority of Americans live in states that are outside of being competitive. And so —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds, Rob.

ROB RICHIE: — it’s in our interests. It has strong popularity. OK. So, states can join together and allocate their electoral votes to the popular vote winner, and now five more states can join the existing states that have done it, and this can be implemented by 2028. That’s the gist of it. And people can check out NationalPopularVote.com to learn more about it.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to the end of the Electoral College. Talk about how the Electoral College was established, Rob Richie, so unusual in the world, and now the movement to abolish it.

ROB RICHIE: It’s a really important question, because we can sometimes assume that the founders were dealing with the same realities that we are today, but they weren’t. They had just come together as in a young, very young nation. They had incredibly different suffrage rules in different states. Pennsylvania had more people voting than Massachusetts, you know, by exponentially different numbers. And so, there were people like James Wilson from Pennsylvania that were supporting a national popular vote for president, as part of “We the people” should act as Americans. But the realities made it difficult, particularly when you added in the slave states, Virginia and on South, that wanted to have their population matter even if a whole lot of it was slaves who were disenfranchised.

And so, their compromise was to have the number of members of Congress that each state has, which is grounded in population, be turned into electoral votes, so every state gets the number of electoral votes equal to their members of Congress regardless of their voter turnout, suffrage rules or, in the case of the 18th century, slavery. And that has been a system we kind of stuck with. So, every state has these electors. The states choose them, how to allocate them. They combine their votes. And if you win a majority of the Electoral College, then you become president. But the really is a different world from where we are today, which is why it’s time to really change it.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, how does it change? Talk about the first states that challenged this, and what it would take to ultimately end. And where are the polls of Americans on what they want?

ROB RICHIE: Well, first, on the polls, Americans overwhelmingly want a national popular vote. It’s generally, when it’s polled, at 65, 70%. In all the states that are about to be asking this question about whether they should act to have a popular vote for president, it has strong majority support. So that’s where the people are.

And the movement from this is — I guess one analogy is, when Dorothy is in Oz figuring out how to get home and she realizes she’s had her ruby slippers all along that allows her to do that, states have actually always had the power to make this change. And the recognition was in the early 2000s. A guy named John Koza sort of came up with the idea of a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is states have these powers over what to do with their electors and to join with other states to act together, that allows them to make a change.

So, the first state that passed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, back in 2007, was Maryland. And a new state senator who had just come into the body was Jamie Raskin, who had been on our board of directors at FairVote and a big democracy champion. And Jamie kind of made the argument very persuasively to his colleagues in Maryland to join the agreement. So, the agreement is to say, “We’re going to give all of our electoral votes not to the statewide winner, but to the national popular vote winner, once that action is decisive,” meaning that the number of states in the agreement have to collectively have a majority of the Electoral College. So, they’d want to be in a situation where they always know that by doing this, that the national popular vote winner will always become president.

So, that has been a slow process since Maryland in 2007, but just dogged, persistent work. More than 3,000 state legislators have sponsored or voted for the national popular vote plan as it’s moved around the country. There’s been bills in every single state. And 18 states and D.C. have actually passed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

And now this election has opened up a path where, even though Republicans have had a history of backing this, Democratic votes have the power to now put this in play. So, we have new Democratic trifectas in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and there could be other potential states.

AMY GOODMAN: Governor — trifectas meaning the governor and both houses of the legislature are Democrat.

ROB RICHIE: Correct, meaning that Democrats have the power. If they want to stand for a national popular vote, which has this strong majority support and would bring all the country into an equal way of electing the president, they have the power to do this. And once it goes over 270 electoral votes combined in the compacting states, then it governs the next election. Those states are now committed in this binding agreement to award their electoral votes to the candidate that wins the national popular vote.

There’s been a ton of conversations about this. It’s been something that every state legislator is an authority on elections, so you have to have just lots and lots of conversations. And again, thousands have been persuaded to support this, and now it’s moving in a very serious way in the final states to put it over the top.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s fascinating, I’m sure if you polled Americans and asked them, “Do you directly vote for president in the United States?” overwhelmingly, they would say yes. They would not say, “Oh no, there’s the Electoral College in between.”

ROB RICHIE: I know. It’s one of these, you know, weird artifacts — not the only one. You know, I’m a big critic of just only electing people people with single-member districts without proportional representation, and, as we talked about, having single-choice elections compared to a ranked-choice voting ballot. And there’s just a lot of things that we have done for a long, long time that we think just have to be that way, and it’s not the case.

And this is a really important time for stepping back and saying, “What is the best things that we can do for our democracy?” Voters did a lot of good things on the ballot this year, on ballot measures, on pro-democracy measures. And now our legislators can build on that and keep the momentum going.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what is called the Montana Plan and its significance?

ROB RICHIE: It’s a fascinating plan. A guy named Tom Moore from the Center for American Progress kind of came up with the idea. But corporations act in states based on having corporate charters that are defined in state law. And his insight, kind of one of these ruby slipper kind of moments of thinking about things differently, is that in those charters, you can regulate what corporations can do.

And in the Montana Plan, which just passed by some version of two to one, and, you know, is going to be litigated, as these things usually are, but the idea is that the corporate charters can say corporations do not have the power to give money to campaigns. And that affects their sort of general or, you know, political spending, but that it also means that if you’re trying to form, like, a super PAC or some entity, they always have to be incorporated, and that can be regulated, as well. So, essentially, it’s saying, yes, there can be a lot of money spent on campaigns, but it needs to be spent by individuals. And that sort of opens up an avenue to sort of take on Citizens United in the states.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Rob Richie, I want to thank you for being with us, president and founder of Expand Democracy, senior adviser with FairVote. To see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. Thank you so much.