The Mechanics
Fusion voting has just one difference from current election rules: Different parties can nominate the same candidate, yet keep their own place on the ballot. That may sound small, but it has a big impact. By giving third parties the "ballot freedom" to support major-party candidates or run their own, it solves the spoiler and wasted vote problems. And by creating a more informative ballot, it leads to better-educated voters and more accountable, issue-oriented politics.
With fusion voting, voters have the option of voting for their preferred candidates on the line of any party that has endorsed them. Votes for each party are tallied separately, but added together to determine the winner. When voters see that several parties have endorsed a candidate, they have more information about where that candidate stands. And when candidates win with third-party votes, they have a better sense of what voters want.
Here's how it can work:
| Candidate Ballot Line | % of vote | |||
John Smith Major Party A | 48% | |||
Matt Jones Major Party B | 49% | |||
John Smith Minor Party C | 3% |
The votes John Smith receives from Party A and Party C are tallied seperately and then added together to produce his total. John Smith wins with 51% of the vote.
When we say fusion we don't mean nuclear power.
Fusion, also sometimes called "cross-endorsement" or "open-ballot voting"' has nothing to do with what goes on inside an atom. What is it? A simple election reform that allow major and minor parties to constructively make an alliance. It solves the so called "spoiler" and "wasted vote" dilemmas.
In a way, you could think of fusion as the uniquely American version of proportional representation in which minor parties can make a coalition with major parties. The only difference is that under fusion, the alliance happens before the election.
For much of our country's history, minor parties played a vital role engaging voters and bringing new ideas into the political mainstream. Parties like the Free-Soilers, Greenback, Prohibition and, most famously, Populists ran candidates in thousands of elections, in coalition with one of the major parties, and so avoided the "wasted vote" problem that makes third parties marginal today. They invigorated our democracy by bringing ideas like abolition, the eight hour day, and even temperance into the public discussion.
They were able to do this because the voting rules in most states used to be different. The electoral system we used for the first 135 years in this country is called different things by different historians – cross-endorsement, multiple party nomination, plural nomination, ballot freedom or open ballot voting – but it all means the same thing. The most common historical name is fusion, and we believe it is time to revive it.
