The False Promise of Party-Centric Reform

A handful of political scientists are over-glorifying political parties, and as part of their anti-RCV strategy misrepresenting Fusion Voting's past and its future prospects

[DemocracySOS welcomes Seamus Allen as a guest contributor. Seamus studies the design of public institutions in Stanford University's Public Policy Program and is an editor at the Stanford Daily Magazine. He is also a research assistant in Stanford's Deliberative Democracy Lab, where he helps to examine the profound ways citizens can reach consensus and reconciliation through moderated discussions.]

Electoral reform is having a bright moment in the United States right now. It is easy to see why: the dysfunctional governance, voter apathy, and rising polarization produced by our 18th-century electoral systems make a compelling case for change.

But what change to pursue? For the vast majority of the public, the end goal is clear: we want a democracy that provides representation for all. To accomplish that, the US needs to adopt some form of proportional representation (PR). How PR is to be achieved, however, is an open question.

In recent months, a conversation has ensued among a group of political scientists and democracy advocates centered around the dichotomy of “party-centric” reform vs. “candidate-centric” reform. There are compelling reasons to believe this dichotomy is a false one, since a number of democracies around the world as well as US states have strong political parties even as voters select individual candidates. Even so, it is worthwhile to examine the political viability of the party-centric approach.  Should this become a guiding philosophy for the reform movement, it ought to be one that allows us to seize this moment and make lasting change. 

The Challenge of Selling Party-Centric Reform to the Electorate

In order for party-centered reform to be a workable plan, its proponents need to sell Americans on the idea that political parties are their salvation. But this is a tough sell. It is not a new observation that Americans aren’t in love with political parties. Gallup polling from last year shows both parties underwater: Republicans received just 37% favorability among US adults, with the Democratic party inching in only slightly higher at 41%.

This is not in and of itself a damning case. In politics, hating the establishment is a popular sentiment that frequently fails to have any real impact. Congress is a prime example: only 19% approve of the way the institution is performing, yet congressional incumbents enjoyed a whopping 98% re-election rate in 2022.

That said, there is nonetheless evidence of an even deeper anti-party sentiment. If we switch our metric from approval of specific parties to trust in political parties in general, things fall off a cliff. Among US respondents to the most recent wave of the World Values Survey, just 11% expressed “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in political parties as institutions. 

Many of the successful ballot initiatives in the United States, from term limits to primary reform, have been based on anti-party sentiment – the “swamp” in Donald Trump’s terminology. The top-two primary won easily in Washington in 2004, 60 percent to 40 percent, with a slogan of “vote for the person, not the party.”  At the city level, nonpartisan elections now dominate. St. Louis recently joined that club in a 68% voter landslide. Only a sliver of cities have resisted the ongoing tide to eliminate parties from local elections. One need not support this tide to recognize its power.

Most other public institutions have an incentive to cultivate trust in themselves. But political parties operate in competition and have an incentive to cultivate distrust in each other. It’s you against me in the Winner Take All Land of Ds and Rs—and the takeaway for most voters isn’t that both parties are wrong about the other and parties are trustworthy. It is that the parties are right about each other, and you can’t trust either of them.

This distrust presents a formidable barrier. If you want to pitch your reform as making parties stronger, you’re going to need to fight through that distrust. Because this corrosive distrust doesn’t appear to be a momentary blip. In fact, it dates back to our very founding. Madison, Washington and other framers were famously anti-party and intended our democracy to be a mechanism for filtering out the best and wisest people (for them, white landowning men) to lead and deliberate: a profoundly candidate-centric vision.

We are not bound by these intentions – indeed America quickly thwarted the framers’ intentions by developing a party-based system. But the echoes of this attitude remain etched into our political fabric. They are visible in our low trust in political parties and in the fact that while most independents lean to one party or the other, independents nonetheless form nearly half of our electorate.

The bottom line is that any "party-centric" reform is likely to be unpopular. Political parties are unpopular institutions, even when the party system is functioning fairly well. Further, without a solution to the spoiler effect, any advancement of minor party power is likely to result in more spoiled elections, to be unpalatable to incumbents, and will therefore always be at risk of repeal.

Fusion is neither party-centered nor a real solution

As a solution to the spoiler dilemma that prevents the existence of a multiparty system, some proponents of the party-centric model propose fusion voting as the first step on the path to reform. Fusion voting allows 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. In short, fusion – also known as cross-ballot endorsement – gives the smaller party some brand recognition along with its own ballot line, and potentially allows the smaller party to avoid being a spoiler by not running its own candidates.

To assess Fusion Voting, first, let’s address the elephant in the room. If fusion is to be the standard for party-centric reform, then party-centric reform had its shot at lasting change in the past – and failed. Fusion voting used to be practiced in a number of states, but today it is fully banned in 43 states and the District of Columbia. Further, only two states regularly use full, disaggregated fusion in their elections: New York and Connecticut. Here, history is instructive.

Most anti-fusion laws were passed during or subsequent to the ballot reforms of the 1890s, largely by Republican politicians seeking to prevent a potential center-left fusion of Populists and Democrats in states where progressive populists held the balance of power. 

Prior to this era, political parties themselves printed and distributed ballots, creating few barriers to the existence of fusion. Anyone with a political party and the capacity to print ballots could add a name to their list. However, the party-ballot system slowly broke down over time for reasons largely unrelated to fusion itself, eventually culminating in widespread fraudulent voting and intimidation in the 1888 presidential election. This provoked a backlash against the private party-ballot system, leading many states to adopt the Australian ballot system, which provided for a common ballot printed at public expense and distributed by the government, and also a secret ballot – things we take for granted today.

With the Australian ballot system came the need to establish rules determining who was considered a lawfully nominated candidate from a party and how candidates would appear on the ballot. Suddenly, the details of how ballots were designed became a matter of public control – and one with partisan implications.

Even though fusion had a long previous history of use in the US, it did not last long subsequent to the Australian ballot’s adoption. The initial wave of fusion bans was a partisan tactic, borne out of a clear, circumstantial advantage that fusion gave to Democrats over Republicans at the time. It is easy to imagine, in our present day, the GOP moving to ban fusion once again should smaller parties find themselves consistently aligning with Democrats – or Democrats moving to ban fusion if smaller parties consistently align with the GOP. 

Fusion bans are not a relic of the past, either. In South Carolina, Republicans banned fusion in 2022 – and not a single representative or senator of either party voted against the bill. Democrats did the same in Delaware in 2011, after a set of Libertarian candidates attempted to gain ballot access through their own party and both major parties at the same time. Just two representatives voted against the Delaware bill. 

Most prominently, fusion has survived in New York, the single state where disaggregated fusion has been in longstanding use – but just barely. An influential commission in 2019 contemplated banning fusion and received testimony from the state Democratic chair and other party leaders in support of the ban. That testimony paved the way for a new law that now makes it much harder for minor parties to get on the ballot at all. 

In recent years, leading papers like the New York Times and Albany Times Union have editorialized against fusion. In 2015, the Times wrote: “New York politicians endorse this antiquated system, called fusion voting, because they can pick up extra votes on the extra ballot lines. The mini-parties, which often push more extreme policies, mostly survive by nominating the same big-name candidates as the two big parties….New York lawmakers should work to make the ballot less of a muddle. One way to make matters simpler for voters would be to require a politician to pick one party – and one party line.”

In the few other states with fusion voting, its standing is on thin ice. This year in Vermont a powerful committee chair introduced legislation to end fusion with the backing of the state Democratic Party. The bill was only halted after testimony from Lt. Governor David Zuckerman who made the backhanded argument that fusion weakened parties because “The more party-focused we make the process, the more polarizing we make the process.”

While fusion voting in Connecticut doesn’t seem to be triggering repeal legislation, it also isn’t doing much for minor parties. Fusion presents smaller parties with a horrible dilemma: run your own candidates to build your party, or cross-endorse a major party nominee who doesn’t necessarily share your party’s issues and values, in the hopes that the cross-endorsed candidate wins enough votes for your party to preserve your party’s ballot line (states require parties to win a certain percentage of the vote to preserve “major party status”). Both the Green Party and Independent Party lost their status and their ballot lines because they didn’t cross-endorse a major party candidate.

Unlike ranked choice voting, which allows minor parties to run and compete freely, and truly liberates parties, candidates and voters from the scourge of spoilers and split votes, fusion voting still has one foot stuck in that spoiler quicksand. For example, when third-party candidates like Ross Perot and Ralph Nader ran for president, both were determined leaders with their own national profiles. Even if fusion had been operable in all 50 states, it would not have prevented Ralph Nader from spoiling Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, especially in the key states of Florida and New Hampshire (Gore’s loss of Florida by a mere 537 votes is legendary, but he lost tiny New Hampshire and its decisive four electoral votes by only 7000 votes, as Nader won over 22,000 votes).

By leaving this critical flaw over spoilers and split votes intact, fusion may actually exacerbate the problem. If minor parties want to show independence from the major parties, it is likely there will be more spoiled elections and counter-majoritarian outcomes. But if they kowtow to the spoiler pressure and let themselves become a hollowed out version of a political party that mostly cross-endorses major party candidates, they risk making a mockery of what a political “party” actually is. Voters are unlikely to view “third parties” that almost always cross-endorse major party candidates as the model for diverse representation that the US so desperately needs.

The idea that fusion is a “party-centered” reform that helps build minor parties, or amplifies the presence of “more parties and better parties,” is a specious argument at best. In actual fact, it has always presented minor parties with the same old “winner take all” dilemma – whether to run your own candidates and risk spoiling, or submerge your electoral ambitions. If this is the best hope for a foundation for proportional representation, then minor political parties and party-centered reforms stand no chance of succeeding, either now or in the future.

Conclusion

Electoral reform is always difficult. Convincing those in power to switch to a different system than the one that gave them that power is a hard sell. The conclusion from fusion’s widespread banning, both today and in the past, is clear: even once implemented, major parties and incumbents will largely retain their incentives against it, putting the reform at risk for retrogression in the future. 

Parties are certainly essential democratic institutions, and the concept of a third party remains broadly popular. But that does not mean party-centric reform is a message that will resonate broadly with a national audience. No amount of political fantasy by a handful of political scientists is going to change that. 

Seamus Allen @Seamus_J_Allen