Does Fusion Voting offer a new horizon for US politics?

Fusion is enjoying a surge in popularity. But what are its pros and cons?

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[Editor’s note: this article is the first in a three-part dialogue between DemocracySOS’s Steven Hill and political scientist Lee Drutman from New America. Here is a link to Drutman’s response to Hill’s original post below: "Yes, Fusion does offer a new horizon for US Politics." And here is a link to Hill’s response to Drutman “Fusion yes, but more study of modern-day uses needed.” This kind of thoughtful debate about which political reforms are most salient for the current moment, as well as the strategy and tactics for enacting reform, is a core part of our mission at DemocracySOS. We hope you find this back-and-forth discussion informative and interesting.]

One political reform that is having a revival in popularity is called “fusion voting,” or simply “fusion.” Like instant runoff voting (ranked choice voting in single-winner elections) fusion tries to diminish the “spoiler problem” of minor party candidates taking voters from one of the major party candidates with whom they are most ideologically aligned.

It does that by allowing a candidate to appear on the ballot under multiple political party labels simultaneously – for example, Democrat and Green and Labor – and the voter has the option of voting for that candidate as the standard bearer for any (but only one) of those political parties. The votes for the candidates are tallied separately by party, and then added together to produce the final outcome. This also allows the smaller political party to register its public support without taking a chance of running its own candidate and (in the example above) splitting the center-left vote among too many candidates, thereby allowing the candidate they all like the least (their “greater evil”) to win. This dynamic would work exactly the same among conservative candidates and voters from the center-right to further-out right.

In short, fusion – also known as cross-ballot endorsements – gives the smaller party more brand recognition along with its own ballot line. Minor parties often have difficulties fielding a candidate in every race, so fusion also allows that minor party to try to use its ballot line to influence even those races in which it has not been able to recruit its own candidate by dangling its endorsement in front of a major party candidate (though that feature has led to some partisan shenanigans and horse trading – more on that below). If the race is close, the minor party endorsement might play the role of kingmaker.

Fusion’s long history of reform

Fusion has waxed and waned in prominence for the past three decades, and it has quite a colorful history. It was very popular at the end of the 19th century, with the most famous exemplar being William Jennings Bryan who ran for president in 1896. He was originally given the Populist Party ballot line and then, launched by the momentum of his “Cross of Gold” speech, one of the most famous political speeches in US history, Bryan was also listed as the Democratic Party nominee. Across the country, fusion voting was used successfully by other parties like the Greenbacks and later the Progressives.

Then, in a number of states, the duopoly Democratic and Republican parties became concerned about the success of third parties. So they began banning the use of fusion tickets wherever they could. Today, 42 states ban fusion in almost all elections, instead forcing candidates to run as the standard bearer of only a single party.

Of those handful of states where fusion has survived, it has gained the most usage and attention in New York State. There, fusion has allowed a modicum of power and respect to smaller parties like the Conservative Party, whose votes for Republican candidates have been crucial to some victories for governor and U.S. Senator. And fusion has allowed the Working Families Party in New York to be a political player, at times pushing their own progressive candidates and other times endorsing moderate Democrats like Hillary Clinton for Senate and Andrew Cuomo for governor, and having the Working Families name appear on the ballot along with the Democratic Party’s, nominating the same candidate.

I remember in the early years of the Center for Voting and Democracy – now known as FairVote – in the 1990s we had regular contact with the leading proponents of fusion who had formed the New Party (now known as the Working Families Party). Danny Cantor, head of the New Party, and Joel Rogers, a University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist and MacArthur Genius grant recipient, were smart and serious champions of fusion. I had great respect and admiration for them, though sometimes we had minor “inside baseball” disagreements.

For example, they liked to call fusion the “American form of proportional representation” – which is certainly not the case, I’ll explain why in a minute – even as we were advocating for the real proportional representation. To their credit, after some vigorous dialogue, they stopped trying to steal our thunder in that way, and on-the-whole relations were fairly collegial among we fellow reformers. Political reform is a tough business and it’s a big country, so we thought it was fine for them to work on fusion in those places where they thought they could gain traction, and we could do the same in other parts of the country where proportional representation or ranked choice voting attracted more interest.

In the 1990s, Rogers and Cantor hooked their strategy to a lawsuit in which they litigated their belief that states are constitutionally required to permit candidates to appear on more than one party's ballot line as an expression of a minor party's First Amendment right of political association. But in 1997 the US Supreme Court overturned a federal appeals court decision and rejected the New Party’s argument (Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, No. 95-1608). In the 6-3 decision, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist displayed the court majority’s long-held ignorance and contempt of minor parties, and their the important role in US history as the laboratories for new ideas. Rehnquist’s opinion held, for the first time, that perpetuating the two‐​party system is a legitimate state interest justifying discrimination against the rights of political parties.

With that legal loss, advocates for fusion voting began a slow retreat, working to demonstrate fusion’s worth in states like New York instead of spreading it to other states. Only recently has the effort to seed fusion in new places re-emerged, with attempts at gaining traction in New Jersey, Oregon and a few other states.

To fuse or not fuse:  pros and cons

As we assess the various reforms that are being promoted to prevent our mudslide into a voterless, polarized, post-democracy—from the various campaign finance reforms, to None Of The Above (NOTA), to term limits or other electoral systems such as approval voting, Condorcet or range voting — what is most distinguishable is that none of these reforms deal with the fundamental defects of our political landscape created by our antiquated 225 year old winner-take-all electoral system. Those defects include low voter turnout, poor representation of our nation’s diversity, increasingly bitter partisanship, and low policy congruence between what voters say they want and what the politics delivers.

Fusion also fails to grapple with these realities of our broken system. To be sure, fusion does some good things compared to the alarmingly toxic status quo, but it is not the deep change that the United States desperately needs. Getting more granular, fusion voting does relatively little to change the fundamental internal logic that stems from two basic characteristics inherent to our electoral system:

1) Winner Take All, for the most part, is a geographic-based system in which legislative elections usually are contested in single-seat district elections (including for all congressional seats, most state legislative seats, and most city council seats in major cities). You win representation based on where you live rather than what you think, and there is only a single winner in each contest, as if that is the only viewpoint that matters – no wonder our country is so polarized, with so many “orphaned voters” shut out of representation. Nuance of representation is virtually non-existent.

2) Winner Take All, for the most part, is a proxy for a two-party/two-choice system, since smaller parties almost never reach the high percentages of votes typically needed to win a district seat, which is most often decided by overwhelming landslide margins; by definition, a minority perspective, whether a geographic, partisan or racial minority, does not normally win a majority or even the highest plurality of votes.

For those reasons, fusion rarely results in electoral victories for the minor parties themselves – it does not lead to a true multiparty democracy, or proportional representation – and it does not result in a significantly higher number of voters being able to elect their favorite candidates or party. One longtime observer of the New York political scene, elections attorney Jerry Goldfeder, has observed that “Truth be told, fusion doesn't affect very many races.” And when a smaller party like Working Families supports Hillary Clinton and Andrew Cuomo, fusion actually may reinforce the duopoly instead of offering voters a variety of choices and perspectives that our modern-day, multi-everything society so badly needs.

It is telling that most established democracies in the world have rejected our winner-take-all elections because of their quirky defects. And it is hard to imagine that the addition of fusion voting to this very antiquated system would make it any more attractive to those living outside the American bubble.

Not all minor parties agree about fusion

While the Working Families and Conservative parties in New York have been supporters and users of fusion, and have demonstrated examples of how it sometimes can be used effectively to pressure one of the two major parties, other small parties in the US have decided they want no part of it.

The Green Party, for example, is actually opposed to fusion voting. It has a different strategy than WFP, believing that the best way to build their party is to run their own candidates, not “fuse” with Democratic Party candidates. The Green Party of New York says that fusion voting is manipulated as a “horse-trading patronage game;” for example, there have been instances in which major parties have tried to steal the ballot line from a minor party by having a few partisans switch enrollment to the minor party. The Greens contend that fusion is used to “provide political cover for the Democratic and Republican parties,” at the same time that it enables political machines to “masquerade as small parties.”

The Greens criticized the Working Families Party for giving moderate Democrat governor incumbent Andrew Cuomo its ballot line in 2018, after running a primary candidate on an anti-Cuomo platform, accusing WFP of horse-trading its endorsement. “Republicans chase the Conservative party line as Democrats do the WFP… It is difficult to see how fusion voting serves the interests of democracy.”

WFP counters that by endorsing Cuomo or Hillary they are “in the game” and not being ignored. They are promoting their own brand in races where they would not have run a candidate anyway, which has positive spillover effects when they run their own progressive candidates in other, more targeted races.

But for the Green Party, ranked choice voting is a better electoral system for promoting its brand and dealing with the spoiler accusations that continually dog smaller parties in the US. A voter can rank a Green candidate first, because that candidate represents their views on climate change and other environmental issues, but in case that Green candidate can’t win (which is 99.9999 percent of the time), the voter can rank a second choice, such as a pro-environment Democrat, as their backup in the “instant runoff.” For the Green Party, this is an existential identity issue about what a political party is, and how it is supposed to grow. “Unlike the major parties’ fusion allies, the Green Party runs its own candidates and offers voters an independent, electoral alternative,” say its press release.

Both strategies have their merits – and also their downsides. The Libertarian Party, on the other hand, has a less strident view. The Libertarian Party of New York has engaged in fusion, and when South Carolina had fusion, the Libertarian Party there tried to use it. According to Richard Winger, the nation’s leading expert on ballot access laws, “All the centrist parties seem to like fusion.” Indeed, the recent renewed interest in fusion seems focused on how to empower centrist parties, like a newly formed Moderate Party in New Jersey, that can attract votes from both major parties as well as independent voters, and potentially reduce polarization.

Different types of fusion cause (con)fusion

But the dilemmas over fusion voting go deeper. It turns out there are two distinct forms of fusion, with important features in each that many pro-fusion advocates try to ignore or over-simplify. The first form, known as disaggregated or full fusion voting, is the kind used in New York (as well as Connecticut, though fusion is seldom deployed there). Full fusion is the type I previously described, in which a candidate can be listed on separate ballot lines of multiple parties simultaneously. Proponents believe that full fusion voting provides an important communicative function, because if a candidate wins an election with a significant portion of votes from the third-party line, those voters will have sent a clear message about their priorities that they could not have otherwise sent if faced with the choice of voting for that same candidate on the major party ballot line.

In Oregon and Vermont, on the other hand, a different form of fusion voting is used, known as aggregated or partial fusion voting. In these states, candidates who are nominated by multiple parties appear on the ballot only one time, but with a list of every party that nominated them next to their name. Unlike full fusion, where a voter selects the multi-nominated candidate on the ballot line of the party she/he wishes to support, it is not possible for that voter to indicate which of the parties she/he actually favors.

The advantage of partial fusion voting is purely administrative, as it results in a simpler ballot for the voter to navigate. With a full fusion voting ballot, the same cross-endorsed candidate is listed multiple times. If a number of candidates are cross-endorsed by multiple political parties, the ballot would get quite lengthy. If a particular race had eight candidates, each of them nominated on average by 2.5 political parties, that would result in 20 candidate listings on the ballot.

NY State fusion ballot: Gov Andrew Cuomo listed four times on the same ballot; candidate Rob Astorino listed three times.

Now throw in another wrinkle – imagine a full fusion voting ballot combined with ranked choice voting, in which voters are allowed to rank all the numerous candidate listings. Ideally, fusion and RCV could go well together, as it would allow third parties to have multiple options of either running their own candidate or cross-endorsing a major party candidate, with no spoiler effects interfering in the voter’s choices. But the ballot design would be exceedingly complex. For fusion and RCV to play nicely together, the better option would be to use partial fusion voting. But partial fusion does not allow third parties to have maximum brand exposure the way that full fusion does.

Does fusion have a future?

Fusion has been knocking around the American political landscape, in one form or another, for well over a century. In recent years, it has made some notable contributions in offering voters more electoral choice, especially in those very local situations where politics are dominated by a single political party, such as in heavily Democratic New York City. Some progressives in New York feel that it has given organized constituencies – especially labor unions and communities of color – a degree of influence over any perceived rightward drift of Democratic Party leaders.

Now, some fusion advocates feel that it can empower moderate political parties to act as a bridge between the polarized major parties, and win support from independent voters. But there is no real historical precedent for this, and it seems unlikely because any candidate or party that is trying to appeal to voters from both political parties is likely to appeal to none of them. The mushy middle seldom achieves electoral success in US politics.

In a winner-take-all system, US history shows that your only real option as a political party is to increase your support to the point where you can replace one of the other two major political parties, as happened in early America in the battles between the Federalists, Democratic-Republicans and Whigs, and in the UK in the early 20^th century when the trade union-backed Labour Party overtook the Liberal Party to become the main opposition to the Conservative Party in the early 1920s.

In Downsian terms, fusion voting does not sufficiently empower the median voter, nor does it much empower voters on the fringes, because in a winner-take-all system a smaller political party simply needs to win too many votes to be influential. For those reasons, fusion’s impact will always be limited, and it will never foster a 21^st century democracy where voters have real choices and real voices. At the end of the day, whatever local merits it might occasionally manifest, fusion voting does not fundamentally alter the troubling toxicities of America’s antiquated winner take all system.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776