Fusion voting roundup: A new report, a new scholars' letter, and so much more

The case for re-legalizing fusion voting just got a little more powerful

The current political moment feels so ominous in so many ways. So I will spare you the big think piece on how we’re headed to Hades in a handbasket. Instead, I give you a roundup on one solution out of our doom loop — fusion voting.

As regular readers of this newsletter know, I am an enthusiast of fusion voting. In fusion, I see an opportunity to break the two-party doom loop by allowing minor parties to organize and play a constructive role in our politics, thus introducing new potential for fluidity and realignment in our dangerously calcified politics.

(For those new to the topic, or in need of a quick refresher: “Fusion” voting denotes the ability of more than one party to nominate (with their consent) a candidate in an election, on a separate ballot line, with votes cast for the candidate on that ballot line counted separately and then incorporated into their total.) 

Look around the world, and you will see how broad, multiparty, pro-democracy coalitions have been so crucial in defeating the illiberal far-right. The recent French parliamentary election provided a good example. Macron’s centrist alliance and the left-wing New Popular Front coalition effectively endorsed each other where each had the strongest chance to win. This was an informal fusion, via France’s two-round system, that marginalized the far right.

Or last year in Poland: a three-party pro-democracy coalition defeated a far-right illiberal government and formed a new governing coalition.

The multiparty element was key in both elections. Different voters could support different parties in the coalition for different reasons, and different parties could prioritize different messages and give voice and representation to different groups of voters. 

Fusion voting is one way to make this multiparty pro-democracy coalition possible in American politics. 

I also see fusion voting as a key piece of the pro-parties reform movement. Since I consider political parties as the central institutions of representative democracy, and the poor health of our political parties as a core problem of democratic weakness, I think we need to direct our political reform efforts towards more and better parties.  Fusion voting centers parties by focusing on party building. It thus directs reform energy towards more and better parties, as opposed to more and better candidates

But, you may ask: how much do we really know about fusion voting? What are the best arguments for fusion voting? And who else thinks this is a good idea, anyway? 

Well, if these are your questions… have I got a trio of new documents for you!

First, my colleagues at New America, Oscar Pocasangre and Maresa Strano, have a terrific new report, What We Know About Fusion Voting. I’ll hit the highlights in this newsletter. 

Second, there’s a new scholars’ letter in support of fusion voting, which I’ve signed, along with 120 others (and counting) —  some pretty big names in the democracy field, including  Guy Charles, Kathy Cramer, Larry Diamond, Aziz Huq, Alex Keyssar, Steve Levitsky, Jane Mansbridge, Bertrall Ross, Nick Stephanopoulos, and Larry Tribe — And many more. I also co-led the drafting of this letter, in collaboration with Tabatha Abu El-Haj, and Lisa Disch. 

And third, there is a new American Bar Association (ABA) Working Paper, “Reviving the American Tradition of Fusion Voting,” which I authored, also with Tabatha Abu El-Haj, and Beau Tremitiere, as part of the association’s Task Force For American Democracy.  

I also will share some thoughts on why I think fusion voting creates a valuable pathway and complement to proportional representation, which I see as the most powerful and transformative electoral reform to break the two-party doom loop.

 

What We Know About Fusion Voting

Let’s start with the new report, What We Know About Fusion Voting.

I highly recommend you read the whole thing. It is clearly written, and draws on both interviews and data analysis, pulling together both existing research and original analysis

Here are the topline findings of the report, based on both original and existing research.

• Fusion Ballots Provide More Information to Voters and  Politicians

• Fusion Ballots May Increase Turnout 

• Fusion Voting Is Not Confusing to Voters

• Fusion Voting Increases Votes for Major Parties, Making  Some Elections More Competitive

• Fusion Voting Encourages Minor Party Building and Growth  — to an Extent

• Fusion Voting Gives Minor Parties Policy Influence

• Fusion Voting Helps Create and Sustain Coalitions

• Fusion Ballots Are Used by Parties across the Ideological  Spectrum

Now, these are all solid findings. But notice what they don’t tell us: whether or not fusion voting is going to change the dynamics of our hyper-partisan politics and break the doom loop.

This is actually kind of unknowable, because it is an expectation about the future. Indeed, as my colleagues write: 

“Our assessment of the effects of fusion voting on system-wide outcomes—like the resurgence of a political center, reductions in polarization, or possibilities for deeper electoral reforms—is more speculative because fusion voting has not been tested in different contexts in the current political climate. We identify various mechanisms through which fusion voting could lead to these broader outcomes, but we are left with more questions than concrete answers. We conclude with a list of these questions and suggestions for how to approach them.”

This honesty and humility is crucially important in approaching reform. There are no “silver bullets.” We’d be foolish to promise any. 

At the same time, accepting the status quo is folly. Our political system is in a self-destructive spiral, and it will not self-correct.  We need to try something!

But just trying something blindly for the sake of trying something, anything, is also silly. We need to have an honest assessment of what different reform interventions might accomplish. 

So how do we know what will work? Well, we can’t know for sure.One frustration for all political scientists is that the world is a complex system, with many interactions. So it is very difficult to evaluate the effect of any single change. There are no lab mice in social science.

Some social scientists have responded to this problem by embracing the experimental methods of the medical and biological sciences like randomized control trials (RCT). This scientific approach has gained tremendous popularity in the academy because of its seeming precision. But these approaches require such limited and controlled conditions that it becomes difficult to generalize beyond the specific experiments. The questions they can answer are very narrow.

Another approach is to argue that all social science is garbage, we can’t know anything, and we should just argue over values. This is the province of some political philosophers.

But we actually can observe some patterns, and the study of politics does offer enough regularities that we can make informed decisions, even if we are still in an ultimately probabilistic universe.

So, I want to quote directly some of the excellent analysis of my colleagues on the question that everybody wants to know about fusion voting — can it build back the political center?  

The current momentum for fusion voting is based on its potential to restore moderate political forces in American politics and create new partisan options for voters who no longer feel represented by their parties. Specifically, as the Republican Party has moved to the far-right, fusion voting could facilitate the emergence of a moderate party that endorses candidates committed to democracy and provides a way for disaffected Republican voters to vote for these candidates on the moderate party line. For this to happen, moderate parties have to emerge, and voters have to be willing to vote on their ballot line, even if it ultimately means that they are voting for an opposing major party candidate. Whether these premises hold are open empirical questions.

… [Currently] the influential minor parties in New York are on the flanks of the ideological spectrum. This was not always the case. The Liberal Party, although it started as a progressive party seeking to pull Democrats to more liberal positions, was able to play a moderating role by endorsing Democrats and Republicans and providing decisive vote shares to their candidacies. It was able to do so because it initially offered a clear programmatic agenda that appealed to a broad enough segment of the electorate and because there were liberal Republican and conservative Democratic candidates for the party to endorse. As middle-class voters moved out of New York City and the demographics of the electorate changed, the support base of the Liberal Party eroded, contributing to its ultimate decline. States with a more equal distribution of partisan voters may offer more fertile ground for moderate parties to emerge today.

The ability to endorse or withhold an endorsement to candidates in the major parties is one of the main tools that fusion systems give minor parties to influence the major parties. By endorsing moderate candidates in the Democratic and Republican parties, a moderate minor party may be able to pull the parties to the center and strengthen the political middle. This presumes, however, that there will be moderate candidates to endorse in the major parties, which in many states is becoming increasingly unlikely on the Republican side. While the short supply of moderate candidates in certain districts could represent a challenge for moderate parties seeking to endorse a candidate with fusion ballots, it could open up political space for minor parties to run their own candidates—especially in districts that established parties write off as a sure victory for the other party.  

Barbara Dudley, an Oregon Working Families Party (WFP) member, acknowledged that in Oregon, “[the WFP] actually cross-nominated a few key Republicans who supported [their] issues, but there is no such thing anymore... the extreme division between the two parties has caught up with Oregon.” Even the middle-of-the-road Independent Party of Oregon has fewer opportunities to cross-nominate. Dudley added that historically, “Independents have cross-nominated both Republicans and Democrats, but as the Republicans have gone further and further to the far-right, the Independent Party cross-nominates Democrats far more often.” If moderate minor parties do not find candidates to endorse in the Republican Party, then they lose one of the main leverage channels available to them and the ability to pull the party to the middle. Moderate minor parties may still provide a home to disaffected Republican voters who no longer feel at home in their party, but they are unlikely to moderate Republican politicians.  

Of course, the supply of candidates is not static, and moderate parties can themselves encourage candidates to moderate or inspire moderate candidates to run for office by offering their ballot line and mobilizing resources. This is the theory of change of the recently formed United Kansas Party, a moderate party that seeks to capitalize on voter disaffection, the growing number of independent voters in the state, and increasing frustration with the two-party system. By giving their ballot line to Democratic or Republican candidates who align with their stated policy agenda, the United Kansas Party hopes to create a moderating force in Kansas politics. This approach has worked in the past, and time will tell if it works in today’s nationalized and extremely polarized politics.

 

This is the crucial point: we are in uncharted territory. Fusion voting has historically been used by groups that did not feel represented by the major parties.

In recent decades, when the major parties oriented more towards the political center, the groups that used fusion voting were more towards the political edges, because they felt unrepresented. 

Now, the groups that are politically homeless are in the center. Fusion would provide them a unique opportunity to organize, build power, and re-orient politics towards a more compromise-oriented political center. 

 

The best arguments for fusion voting? 120+ leading democracy scholars make the case in a letter

So what are the best arguments for fusion voting? I think the new scholars’ statement (signed by over 120 leading democracy scholars, and counting) lays out a pretty good case.

It’s pretty short (at least by the standards of this substack), so I’ll just reprint it here in full, for all to read…

With partisan polarization at dysfunctional highs, public faith in the political system hitting dangerous lows, and two unpopular presidential candidates competing in a high-stakes presidential election, Americans are rightfully worried about the future of our democracy. The good news is that growing concern has also widened discussion of much-needed fundamental reforms to our existing electoral system.

As concerned scholars and advocates for democratic reform, we urge legislative bodies across the country to re-legalize fusion voting in all partisan elections. “Fusion” voting denotes the ability of more than one party to nominate (with their consent) a candidate in an election, on a separate ballot line, with votes cast for the candidate on that ballot line counted separately and then incorporated into their total. This election rule has deep roots in American political history. We believe that its revival today would reinvigorate our democracy by improving representation and accountability while strengthening voters’ rights.

Once legal and common across the nation but now practiced in just Connecticut and New York, fusion enables voters with views outside our two-party duopoly, and the parties representing them, to express their views without wasting their votes on candidates with no chance of winning or spoiling elections. In New York, for example, Joe Biden and Donald Trump each appeared twice on the ballot in 2020: Biden under the separate labels of the Democratic and Working Families parties, and Trump under the Republican and Conservative Party labels. That share of each major party candidate’s final share contributed by these “minor” parties gave those candidates important information on the diverse sources of their support. Often enough, indeed, the minor party’s support of the major party candidate has been the critical margin of their victory, enabling that minor party to bargain with that candidate afterward.

Reviving fusion nationally would be simple enough to do by law. Merely strike from existing laws prohibitions that prevent a candidate from appearing on more than one ballot line. The generative democratic energy that would follow from doing this, we know from our history, is both powerful and benign.

Before the Civil War, fusion voting gave abolitionists in the Liberty, Anti-Nebraska and Free Soil parties a powerful tool for showing their opposition to slavery. After the Civil War, workers in new industries, farmers fighting monopoly power, and newly enfranchised Black men each used fusion voting as a way to simultaneously create their own identity and organization and unite with others in an electoral coalition. In 20-odd states in 1870, 250 fusion candidacies occurred in congressional and gubernatorial races. In 1890, 30 states saw 210 fusion candidacies. 

However, around the turn of the 20th century, major parties in most states intentionally banned fusion voting in an effort to entrench their political power. It worked. Without a crucial place on the ballot, third party leaders and supporters were relegated to the spoiler and wasted vote boxes familiar to us today. Eventually, the notion that America is naturally a two-party system took hold.

Today that two-party system is clearly under strain. One measure of that strain is the growing number of voters, especially younger voters, who identify as political independents — a record high of 43 percent, according to the latest Gallup Poll. While these voters ultimately lean towards one party or the other, this broad disaffection from partisan politics is dangerous for democracy. Political parties are the essential institution of modern mass democracy because they uniquely organize representation for large groups of citizens and connect them to their government. When so many citizens are disengaged, parties struggle to provide their crucial representation and mediation functions. But while parties are necessary to democracy, in a society as diverse as the U.S., no two parties can together manage to represent everyone.

Fusion makes it more likely that voters disaffected with the current parties will exercise their right to associate with others and form new parties because it avoids the problem of election spoiling. It would reengage disenchanted voters, and their diverse organizations, and allow more party diversity. Reviving the option of fusion offers a path out of hardening destructive partisan polarization while aligning closely with the constitutional principles of free association and expression, foundational to the American creed. By contrast, current restrictions on the practice, enacted by the two major parties only for the purpose of preserving their duopoly on political power, are extremely questionable. They clearly violate the associative rights of both individuals and minor parties, placing a significant burden on individual voters’ capacity to organize and express their political preferences.

The long American tradition of fusion voting shows that Americans have always understood the value of casting their vote for the candidate they prefer under the party banner that best reflects their values. In the current moment of divisive polarizing politics, fusion voting would be particularly empowering for the pivotal but increasingly homeless political middle. For example: the many “constitutional Republicans” who can’t bear voting on the Democratic Party ballot line but also cannot bear voting for Donald Trump; or the many working class voters who are tired of Democratic Party political correctness but resist further corporate domination of their lives. All these people could find voice, and electoral respect, in a fusion universe.

There are many things that might be done to improve the rules of American politics, and many we disagree on. But this simple, historically proven change should be adopted immediately and all over. Thus, we end with a simple plea: Re-legalize fusion voting for all U.S. elections!

The letter, by the way, remains open. So if you are a democracy scholar who would like to sign,  please email scholarsforrelegalizingfusion@gmail.com with your name and affiliation.

 

The American Bar Association Task Force for American Democracy takes a closer look at fusion

But wait, there’s more! The American Bar Association (ABA) has a task force for American Democracy. And the association asked for a paper on fusion voting. So, again with Tabatha Abu El-Haj, and this time also with Beau Tremitiere, I co-authored a “Working Paper” entitled “Reviving the American Tradition of Fusion Voting”

Here’s the brief summary:

This Working Paper explains how U.S. democracy is weakened by state-level “anti-fusion” laws that were enacted with the purpose of limiting electoral competition. These restrictions stymie promising efforts to address the dysfunction, volatility, and extremism that plague our political system and governing institutions. Fusion politics offers a path to cross-ideological collaboration and constructive dissent. When more than one political party can nominate the same candidate—that is, when political associations with different views can fuse their efforts behind a single nominee—there are opportunities for flexibility and dynamism, a counterweight to an increasingly contentious zero-sum politics in which the barriers to cross-partisan collaboration are manifold. Instead of being limited to a “spoiler” role, minor parties and their voters can play a crucial part in building and shaping winning coalitions in a constructive and collaborative way.

State anti-fusion laws around the country are on doubtful legal footing: they impose severe burdens on core political rights recognized under state constitutional law, and they do not advance any sufficiently important government interest that could justify the infringement. Building upon successful litigation in New York a century ago, efforts are underway to challenge the constitutionality of these laws in state court—victory could pave the way for politically moderate minor parties to wield an influential ballot line in the near future.

This Working Paper proceeds in four parts. First, we discuss several key ways in which the U.S. political system is failing today—and why that matters for the health and stability of U.S. democracy. Second, we discuss the long tradition and importance of fusion in U.S. elections dating back to the early 1800s. Third, we discuss the potential effects of relaxing anti-fusion restrictions now. Finally, we discuss why anti-fusion laws do not withstand constitutional scrutiny and highlight contemporary litigation efforts to challenge them.

Of course, if you have made it this far into the substack, you might want to just read the whole report. Or grab it for later, while it’s on your mind, and at it to your never-ending reading queue of important and worthwhile reports, which you may eventually read. (Well, at least, that’s what I do — I’m always saving stuff to my Zotero, and sometimes I even read it!) 

While you’re here, you might also like the ABA working paper on Proportional Representation, by Ruth Greenwood, Drew Penrose, and Deborah Apau. Also a great read, especially if you are a nerdy election reform wonk like me. 

And speaking of proportional representation…

 

Is fusion voting a path to proportional representation?

It’s no secret that I think proportional representation is the most transformative electoral reform we could enact. 

So I want to be clear:  I see fusion voting as both a pathway and complement to multiparty proportional representation. 

For proportional representation to succeed in representing the diversity and pluralism of America, we need multiple parties. Fusion voting encourages new parties to organize by giving them a place on the ballot, and encouraging them to play a productive and constructive role in elections.

New parties can help Americans develop new partisan identities, and thus understand how a multiparty system could work in the United States.

Fusion also gives minor parties leverage. They can use that leverage to demand reforms that would allow them to run their own candidates — in particular proportional representation. In the past, fusion parties have not pressed for proportional representation. But in the past, neither electoral reform broadly nor proportional representation in specific were on the political agenda. They are now.

Fusion voting importantly directs reform energy towards a party-centric approach to reform. Political parties are the central institutions of modern representative mass democracy, and healthy political parties are essential to healthy democracy.

The current US political parties are struggling. But the solution cannot be to throw out parties altogether, or move towards an even more candidate-centric approach to politics.

Fusion voting centers parties by focusing on party building. It thus directs reform energy towards more and better parties, as opposed to more and better candidates. This is an important pathway to proportional representation.

Fusion voting also offers a legal pathway towards more and better parties that provides a distinct opportunity. Because fusion was once widely legal, and because many state constitutions have strong freedom of association language, litigation offers a direct path to reviving fusion voting in many states. Already, lawsuits in New Jersey and Kansas are in progress. Other states will follow soon 

For these reasons, I see fusion voting as an important pathway to proportional representation. It is a party-centric reform that builds new parties and can stimulate demand and familiarity with multiparty democracy. It also offers a distinct opportunity for litigation.

Fusion voting also offers an important complement to proportional representation. There are many single-winner elections in the United States. Even with proportional representation for the House of Representatives, Senate elections will still be single-winner elections. Fusion voting is the closest thing to proportional representation in a single-winner election, since parties have a proportional claim on the time and attention of a single winner. With fusion voting for single-winner elections, parties that run separately in proportional elections can come together to endorse candidates, signaling compromise and coalition potential to voters. For executive offices, these cross-endorsements could signal governing coalitions, giving supporters of smaller parties a meaningful voice in single-winner elections.

Certainly, proportional representation is more transformative than fusion voting. The transformative nature is the appeal of proportional representation as well as the challenge. Fusion voting is a powerful step in the direction of multiparty democracy because it creates space for actual new parties to organize and influence elections. New parties can further build the infrastructure and demand for full multiparty proportional representation. 

Am I sure fusion voting will work as intended? Am I sure it will lead to proportional representation? 

No, I am not sure. But I believe it is the most promising pathway forward. 

But again, and I can’t emphasize this point enough, we really are in uncharted territory in our national politics. So we have to make our best guess, based on the best available information, and the most reasonable expectations about how modern mass representative democracy can work, based on how it has worked so far.

We can and should learn as we go, and adjust our expectations both as we learn and the world around us changes. This is why, for example, I have changed my views on ranked-choice voting, which I was previously more enthusiastic about.

But the big idea that I keep coming back to is this: political parties are the essential institutions of modern representative democracy, and our current parties (especially the Republicans) are very unhealthy institutions. I say they are unhealthy because they are not effectively performing the integrative and intermediary functions that political parties must perform to connect citizens to their government, and vice versa. 

So any reform project needs to center healthy political parties. And to get better parties here, we need more of them. This is my guiding framework, and will continue to be until I can be convinced otherwise. 

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