Do You Know What Fusion Voting Is?

Until 2018, neither did I. It’s one of many ways New York State is an election backwater.

Most New Yorkers I talk to don't know why some candidates appear on their ballot three, four or even five times in the same race in the same election. I was among them until last summer, when I was gearing up to vote in the state’s 2018 elections.

During my previous fifteen years of voting in New York City, I had ignored the disquieting fact that my general election ballots were stuffed to the gills with repeated names. With a confused shrug, I overlooked whatever electoral loophole was allowing a Democrat or Republican running for governor, attorney general or even U.S. Senator to be listed simultaneously by three or four other parties I’d never heard of. Usually, my only thought going into the polls during this time was, “Please get me out of this elementary school lunchroom where old ladies are screaming at me before the traumatic flashbacks kick in.”

But back in October, I learned I could print out my own localized sample ballot on ballotpedia.org. Now free of the pressure of making split-second decisions in a chaotic polling place, I used this lead time to figure out why my ballot was overflowing with duplicate names. As it turns out, this is thanks to a long-standing but rarely discussed practice called fusion voting. It’s currently banned in all but eight states. And it creates numerous fairness issues for voters and candidates alike.

What Is Fusion Voting?

Under fusion voting law, parties can nominate candidates from other parties. It’s also known as cross-endorsing. It invariably sees third-party leaders nominating someone who’s already running as a Democrat or Republican in a particular race. That candidate may receive endorsements from multiple parties at once and appear on an unlimited number of ballot lines as a result.

For instance, in New York State’s November 2018 midterm, voters saw two-term Democratic incumbent Andrew Cuomo on the ballot four times in the governor’s race—under the Democratic Party, Working Families Party, Independence Party and Women’s Equality Party (which he founded in 2014). Cuomo is allowed to count all votes cast for him, regardless of party line.

Through this arrangement, New York’s minor parties reap a crucial benefit: If they get at least 50,000 votes in a single election year, they get to stay on the ballot for the next four years, plus they get access to public funding. If they fall short, they are knocked off the ballot, and can only get back on after collecting a massive number of signatures in a very short period of time.

Count the Cuomos

This is but a small example of how many times a candidate may appear on a New York ballot.

All cross-endorsement decisions are made behind closed doors by party heads. Besides the obvious benefit of maximizing a third party’s chances for continued existence, cross-endorsing usually leads to patronage jobs in the winning administration for party insiders, their friends and relatives. This is why most of New York’s minor parties forgo nominating their own candidates and choose to take advantage of the state’s electoral fusion law. The system may be applied to anyone on the ballot in New York, be they state-level or running for president. Obama, Romney, Clinton, Trump—they get to make as many fusion deals as they want in the Empire State.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?

Fusion voting in America started out in the late 19th century with admirable intentions (for the most part). Smaller parties wanted the chance to claim victory by endorsing a big fish, rather than forever watching their own guppy candidates get swallowed up by the two-party system. With fusion, parties eager to push an alternative agenda could get behind a real contender, while allowing voters who were dissatisfied with the major parties to cast a form of protest vote. Yes, a constituent could vote for a Democrat, but not necessarily on the Democratic Party line. Such was the case in the 1896 presidential race when folks could vote for Democrat William Jennings Bryan on the newly founded Populist Party line, if they felt the latter party spoke more to their ideals.

Or, as in the 1894 midterms, a voter in North Carolina could pick a Republican candidate on the Populist Party line. Republican and Populist leaders agreed to a cross-endorsement deal in an effort to weaken the state’s all-powerful and thoroughly corrupt Democratic Party. The Democrats were in charge of running the elections and were known to stuff ballot boxes, among other abuses, not to mention their deadly and destructive Jim Crow law agenda. When North Carolinian Republicans landed their new seats in a congressional landslide, they rewarded their Populist Party allies with patronage jobs, and helped push Populist platforms on the federal and state level. It was a scenario that played out with varying results in states across the country.

Similarly, New York parties initially used the strength of electoral fusion to fight the graft-ridden stranglehold Tammany Hall Democrats had on the state. In 1911, Tammany Hall was so vexed by Republicans’ use of cross-endorsements, it pushed through state legislation outlawing fusion tickets. However, the law was soon struck down by the New York Court of Appeal.

While New York kept fusion voting going, an increasing number of states passed laws banning it. There was certainly nothing noble behind this sweeping change—most state election boards were run by either Democratic or Republican Party chiefs, and the last thing they wanted was their archrivals getting fat off votes that would otherwise be thrown away.

Harms of Fusion Voting

While fusion brings with it valuable ideas that challenge the extreme dominance of the two-party system, it comes with a host of fallout problems, most of which fall on the voters.

Fusion voting necessitates a whole new layer of political maneuvering and stunts the growth of true third parties that want to push their ideals forward. In New York especially, the lack of transparency about fusion agreements leads to an increase in backroom deals (in a state already intimately comfortable in those rooms), promotes unnecessary post-primary wars between candidates, and encourages major-party candidates to adopt platforms they don’t genuinely believe in.

It has also allowed certain third parties in New York to have enormous influence. Democrats actively seek out the cross-endorsement of the influential, progressive-leaning Working Families Party, and Republicans routinely swing further right to court the approval of the Conservative Party. The now-defunct Liberal Party was crucial in helping Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, defeat incumbent Democrat David Dinkins in New York City’s 1993 mayoral race. In return, Liberal Party head Ray Harding got his two sons jobs in the Giuliani administration. (One of them was later convicted of embezzling city funds.) The Liberal Party faded out in 2002 after cross-endorsing Democrat Andrew Cuomo’s failed bid for governor that year, while Ray Harding was later indicted for helping New York’s comptroller get lucrative state pension management contracts for his friends.

Certainly not all third-party executives are as self-serving or corrupt as Harding, but the fusion system fosters confusion and distrust. Cynthia Nixon got the cross-endorsement of the Working Families Party for the 2018 New York Democratic gubernatorial primary. Her progressive agenda lined up much better with the WFP’s than that of centrist incumbent Andrew Cuomo. The week after Nixon lost the primary, the WFP pulled its cross-endorsement from Nixon and transferred it to Cuomo. They could have kept Nixon on their ballot line and backed her as their own gubernatorial candidate in the November general election, but both she and the party were reluctant to pull votes from the Democratic Party and inadvertently help the Republicans. However, due to yet another twist in New York’s antique election laws, a candidate cannot have their name removed from a ballot line unless they transfer to a different race, move to a different district, commit a felony, or die.

Thus the Working Families Party convinced Cynthia Nixon to run for State Assembly in the general election, just so they could get her off their governor’s line and switch their backing to Andrew Cuomo. Nixon agreed to this arrangement, but announced she would not be running an active campaign for the State Assembly seat. Instead, she would endorse the incumbent Democratic candidate, Deborah Glick, for that post. But there was already massive confusion dumped on voters, most of whom didn’t (or couldn’t) follow the minimal news coverage of fusion-related election deals. They only saw that Cynthia Nixon was back on the ballot. In addition, many Nixon fans living in her Assembly district insisted they were ready for a change, and wanted to vote out the 27-year-veteran Glick. But to get Nixon elected to the Assembly, her neighbors would have had to disobey her express wish not to vote for her.

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat out nine-term veteran Joe Crowley for his Bronx/Queens congressional seat in the 2018 Democratic primary, the Working Families Party tried to switch their cross-endorsement from Crowley to Ocasio-Cortez. Eager to move him off their ballot line within the bounds New York law, they asked Crowley to run in the general election in an upstate district where he did not live, for a state-level position he did not want. He refused, calling it “election fraud.” They then asked him to switch his voter registration to Virginia, where he resides during the congressional session—another bizarrely legal way to get a candidate off a New York ballot line.

To Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter consternation, Crowley wasn’t willing to change races, change homes, go to jail or die to help her win in November. Angered, WFP leaders called on voters "to stay away from our ballot line" when it came to Crowley for Congress. Even though Crowley had already vowed to support Ocasio-Cortez by not running an active campaign, some politicos continued to endorse him as a Working Families Party candidate in that race.

Some have argued that it’s not fusion that’s the problem but the unreasonable state laws making it hard to remove a candidate from a ballot line. But the issues with fusion go deeper than that. While the Working Families and Conservative parties do have fairly clear policy stances, many third parties that cross-endorse do not. The Reform Party has backed candidates on the far left and far right. Powerful Democrats like Governor Cuomo find themselves playing to the left, right and center just to appease third-party voters of all stripes.

Meanwhile, the Independence Party is the state’s largest third party, with nearly half-a-million registered voters. This is in no small part due to the fact that many voters think they’re registering as independents when they sign up with the Independence Party. They’re not. It’s a right-leaning group that cross-endorses hard-right Republican candidates like Trumpist and indicted upstate congressman Chris Collins, while at the same time putting big-time Democrats like Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer on their ballot line. The Independence Party has routinely backed Andrew Cuomo, who, in his 2010 gubernatorial win, picked up nearly 150,000 votes on their line. The party’s lack of agenda makes it little more than a power-brokering entity in search of patronage jobs for party insiders, while thriving off of widespread confusion.

The only minor party to avoid the fusion morass is the Green Party, which always runs its own candidates and does not cross-endorse.

Perhaps the worst offense perpetrated by fusion voting is New York’s epic, mind-boggling physical ballots—monstrosities that lead to mistakes and invalidated votes. In the run-up to the 2018 general election, New York City spent $1 million on a TV ad imploring voters to “flip your ballot”. This was an expensive but necessary public service as said ballot was now four pages long and double-sided.

Many critics blamed the ungodly ballot length on the addition of three wordy referendum questions aimed at amending the town charter. But they said nothing about candidates appearing on numerous ballot lines in the same race. Certainly that’s the bigger culprit in making New York’s ballots unwieldy and misleading. If a voter accidentally or unwittingly darkens the circle next to the same candidate’s name more than once, the city will throw their ballot away, no matter how much time they spent researching the candidates or standing in line to vote.

Time for a Solution

A few days after the November 6 midterm, I went to a panel discussion on implementing voting reforms in New York City and asked a question about fusion. Before answering, a city councilman on the panel asked the audience of about 60 civic-minded New Yorkers if they knew what fusion voting was. No one did. Whenever I mention fusion to friends and colleagues, I meet the same response. It eventually dawned on me that that’s how New York’s incumbent political class wants it. It likes its electorate ignorant and slightly confused. How else could New Yorkers put up with runaway chaos at the polls, egregious misinformation sent out in the city’s voting mailers, and the only state in the Union that insists on holding two primaries each election year instead of one?

Because the state does not actively educate its voters on fusion, most New Yorkers don’t get why their candidate is on the ballot so many times under different parties. It’s off-putting. It’s misleading. And it inevitably favors the incumbents.

While many would support the idea that third parties should have a stronger voice in state politics, I don't see how glomming onto New York's big-ticket candidates is an effective way to expand these parties' policy agendas. Yes, American politics must wrest itself from the duopoly dictated by Democrats and Republicans, but there must be other ways for third parties to build their strength. The NY Daily News, New York Post, The Hill and many good-governance groups have called for fusion’s abolition. Even Governor Cuomo, who has benefited repeatedly from his many cross-endorsements, is now asking for its reform (though not its replacement).

It will be hard to devise a fair solution that falls somewhere between the inequitable two-party system and the convoluted, abuse-prone fusion system, but the first step has to be educating the public on what fusion voting is. Most voters are participating in this corrupted practice without knowing how or why it exists. It should be explained clearly through mailers and online campaigns.

Additionally, there should more public funding for third parties that can demonstrate a clear policy platform, allowing them to run their own candidates more successfully and grow their base. Finally, our elected officials, including New York’s U.S. Senators, Representatives, and state and city politicians, should no longer agree to accept cross-endorsements from parties that have no directive other than to make deals for votes.