Open Letter from Scholars in Support of Re-Legalizing Fusion Voting

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.[1] 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.[2] 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.[3]

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!

Sincerely,

Henry Aaron, The Brookings Institution

Tabatha Abu El-Haj, Drexel University

Daron Acemoglu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

John Aldrich, Duke University

Russell Arben Fox, Friends University

Peter Argersinger, Southern Illinois University

Jonathan Askin, Brooklyn Law School

Deborah Avant, University of Denver

Julia Azari, Marquette University

David Bateman, Cornell University

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, New York University

Yochai Benkler, Harvard University

Sheri Berman, Columbia University

Max Besbris, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Asha Bhandary, University of Iowa

Nikolas Bowie, Harvard University

Corey Brooks, York College of Pennsylvania

Nadia Brown, Georgetown University

Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison

John M. Carey, Dartmouth College

Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University

John Carson, University of Michigan

Guy-Uriel Charles, Harvard University

Joshua Cohen, University of California, Berkeley

Gary Cox, Stanford University

Andy Craig, Rainey Center

Katherine Cramer, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Jesse M. Crosson, Purdue University

Melody Crowder-Meyer, Davidson College

Larry Diamond, Stanford University

Lisa Disch, University of Michigan

Lee Drutman, New America

Jonathan Earle, Louisiana State University

Nate Ela, Temple Beasley School of Law

Kevin Esterling, University of California, Riverside

David Faris, Roosevelt University

Joshua Ferrer, University of California, Los Angeles

Janice Fine, Rutgers University

Morris Fiorina, Stanford University

Steven Fish, University of California, Berkeley

Dana R Fisher, American University

Jonathan Fox, American University

Scott Frisch, California State University Channel Islands

William A Galston, The Brookings Institution

Martin Gilens, University of California, Los Angeles

Simon Gilhooely, Bard College

Jerry H. Goldfeder, Fordham Law School

Benjamin Goldfrank, Seton Hall University

Colin Gordon, University of Iowa

Hannah Gurman, New York University

Will Horne, Clemson University

Aziz Huq, University of Chicago

Jeffrey Isaac, Indiana University Bloomington

Joel W. Johnson, CSU Pueblo

Nathan Kalmoe, University of Wisconsin-Madison

David Karpf, George Washington University

Nancy Kassop, State University of New York at New Paltz

Michael Kazin, Georgetown University

Alex Keyssar, Harvard University

Rachel Kleinfeld, United to Protect Democracy (Advisor)

J. Morgan Kousser, California Institute of Technology

Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina

John Krinsky, The City College of New York

Didi Kuo, Stanford University

Bruce Larson, Gettysburg College

Michael Latner, California Polytechnic State University

Peter Levine, Tufts University

Steven Levitsky, Harvard University

Brett Levy, University of Albany

Robert Lieberman, Johns Hopkins University

Arend Lijphart, University of California, San Diego

Nancy MacLean, Duke University

Scott Mainwaring, University of Notre Dame

Jane Mansbridge, Harvard University

Seth Masket, University of Denver

Lilliana Mason, SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University

Nolan McCarty, Princeton University

Elizabeth McKenna, Harvard University

Bonnie Meguid, University of Rochester

Carlin Meyer, New York Law School

Terry Moe, Stanford University

Dan Myers, University of Minnesota

Hans Noel, Georgetown University

Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College

Udi Ofer, Princeton University

Yesim Orhun, University of Michigan

Norman Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute

Paul Piersen, University of California, Berkeley

Thomas Pepinsky, Cornell University

David A.M. Peterson, Iowa State University

Charles Postel, San Francisco State University

Richard Primus, University of Michigan

Lara Putnam, University of Pittsburgh

John W. Quist, Shippensburg University

David Roediger, University of Kansas

Bert Rockman, Purdue University

Joel Rogers, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Bertrall Ross, University of Virginia

Douglas Rushkoff, University of New York, Queens College

Kyle L. Saunders, Colorado State University

Vivien Schmidt, Boston University

Ethan Schneider, University of California, Davis

Nathan Schneider, University of Colorado

Juliet Schor, Boston College

Sanford Schram, Stony Brook University, SUNY

Larry Schwartztol, Harvard Law School

Robert Shapiro, Columbia University

Tim Shenk, George Washington University

Eric Schickler, University of California, Berkeley

Anne-Marie Slaughter, New America

Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania

Steven Smith, Washington University in St. Louis

Joe Soss, University of Minnesota

Daniel Soyer, Fordham University

Michael Steinberg, University of Michigan

Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Harvard Law School

Daniel F. Stone, Bowdoin College

Ruy Teixeira, American Enterprise Institute

Alexander Theodoridis, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Chloe Thurston, Northwestern University

Daniel P. Tokaji, University of Wisconsin Law School

Larry Tribe, Harvard University

Nadia Urbanati, Columbia University

Penny Von Eschen, University of Virginia

Mark Warren, University of British Columbia

Robert F. Williams, Rutgers University Law School

Richard Winger, Ballot Access News

Daniel Wirls, University of California, Santa Cruz

Ekow Yankah, University of Michigan

Ellen Yaroshefsky, Hofstra University

Ethan Zuckerman, University of Massachusetts Amherst

All institutional affiliations are for identification purposes only.

Footnotes

1. Fusion is sometimes confused with “dual labeling.” It shouldn’t be. This alternative approach lumps together all nominations that a candidate receives, separated only by a comma or dash. As such, it is impossible for a voter to signal (or a candidate to know) which party the voter wishes to be associated with. For advocates of a healthy, pluralist democracy in which parties play a visible and constructive role, dual labeling falls short.
2. Third parties also ran stand-alone candidates under their own banner, and occasionally they were successful. But fusion allowed them to be tactically creative, which was never so evident as with the fusion between the Democrats and Free Soilers in the Massachusetts State Legislature who “fused” to send Charles Sumner to the US Senate.
3. North Carolina in the early to mid 1890s captures, for all time, the potential (and the tragedy) of American party politics. For a few brief years, what was known as “fusionism” sustained a coalition between white farmers voting Populist and Black freedmen voting Republican, electing a Governor and a majority of the legislature. It eventually fell, undone by white supremacist ideology and violence. But those brief years mark the only time, from the end of Reconstruction until the second reconstruction of the Civil Rights era, that Jim Crow Democrats were not in control of a former Confederate state. That is the power of fusion: it allows and encourages coalition politics.

If you are a scholar and would like to add your name in support, please email scholarsforrelegalizingfusion@gmail.com with your request.