The Democrats would have guts... oh Ted Kennedy why can't we clone you...

I'm surprised that this is the first I've heard of fusion voting. Why has New York been keeping this such a closely held secret?

I like this idea a whole lot and I haven't even read the article yet.

I think this could be a great incubator for new ideas from the right and the left.  A number of states would benfit from this type of multi-party system.

A problem with the NY system is that third-party nominations are decided either by conventions well before the majority primaries or in primaries held the same day.  Therefore it is not uncommon for someone to lose their major party primary but win a third-party nomination.  New York was the so called "if your in your in" rule which means you can't pull yourself from the ballot once your a nominee.  There you can have a former Democrat candidate still on the ballot in November and he will still draw some votes (even if he has publicly asked people not to do this.  This happened in the Governor races in both 1998 and 2002.  The then-LG (some party switching Republican the jump ship from the Republican after Pataki dropped her from the ticket) in 1998 and Andrew Coumo in 2002 won the Liberal Party lines but lost the Democratic primaries (actually Coumo dropped out right before the primary) but couldn't get off the ballot and drew some votes in the November.  Pataki's margin was greater than these votes both times so it didn't effect the out come, but it has happened in other races in the past.

This would be a good idea, as would ranked voting.  Both would allow a person to vote for a third party candidate without it being a spoiler vote.  However, that is the reason that the Democrats and Republicans block it at every turn and why it will never happen.  I have a different idea:  Since the Green Party is ignored and reviled by the Democratic leadership and thwarted at every turn, Green Party members should all just join the Republican Party and try to reshape that party.  Their presence might actually drive out some of the Christian right and the Republican Party has a progressive history with Teddy Roosevelt's anti-trust/conservationist approach that is probably closer to the Greens than anything the Democrats are offering.

avoid the slide to extremism.  As a party over time slides to an extreme, there would be evidence in each election that more and more of the vote was coming from something like the American Nazi party or the Communist party or whatever.  That might convince moderates that there is a problem.  

Dean has endorsed ranked (or instant runoff voting), which isn't a silver bullet either but means that candidates are elected with majority support, people can vote their consciences without fearing to elect their least favorite choice, and third parties (and their ideas) are legitimate political players.

Neither of the two major parties are going to embrace this, however, unless the grass roots holds their feet to the fire (and even then it won't be easy).

I too grew up in NY, and am a big fan of fusion voting.  The basic advantages:

• to win a major race, you typically need both a major and minor party endorsement - making minority parties a lot more influential (this is why we saw a lot of liberal republicans as mayors in NYC - think John Lindsay)

• it's possible, but not common, for a coalition of minor parties to float a winning candidate

All in all, a minor party can have a lot of influence, and potentially position to grow.

I was deeply disappointed by the Supream Court ruling a few years back.  Sigh...

A couple of articles I found on line:

The Fusion Solution

Why we need fusion

That's good enough for me. Enough investigation and research. Time to get to work.

IRV, which will be consistently blocked by Democrats and to a lesser extent Republicans (since they are currently less threatened by third parties), would definitely help third parties.  No longer would the Democrats have the excuse that a vote for Green is a vote for the Republicans.  With IRV voting, Greens need only to get more votes than either the Democrats or the Republicans (the latter can certainly happen in large cities that are traditionally Democratic).  Then they can run head to head with just the Democrat or the Republican.  This is why Democrats don't want it around.

"The last thing we need right now is to make voting more complicated."

In the first post-apartheid election in South Africa, the country used a proportional representation system more complicated than IRV would be for a presidential election. Yet they managed to pull it off, despite the large segment of illiterate voters and the fact that no one in the country had ever voted in a real election before.

To crib a line from Sam Smith -- are Americans somehow dumber than the rest of the industrialized world that uses proportional representation of one kind or another?

For those who are interested, fairvote.org has great resources on irv and other pr systems.

I am not really sure if I am for or against fusion voting per say, but having been involved in politics in NY, it is political reality. First, it doesn't empower third parties or grassroots, it empowers party bosses. Almost everything that is decided on the 3 minor lines now is handled by the party bosses. Second, it also discourages primaries in the major parties(for better or worse) because often there can be two different Democrats or Republicans in the race. The most extreme example happened for a short time in the Buffalo last cycle, there was an open seat in the state Assembly, and three Democrats were vying for the Democratic nomination. Pat Hoak had won the endorsement of the Independence Party, Dave Shenck had won the endorsement of the Conservative Party and Fran Pordum had won the endorsement of the Working Families Party, at that point all 3 Democrats were set to appear on the ballot no matter who won the Dem nod. Shenck ended up dropping out of the race and Hoak picked up the Con line, but he ended up losing the primary to Pordum and both went on to lose in the General giving the Republicans a seat that had been held by the Dems. The Executive committees of these Parties have full control over the nomination process, the designate the candidate and you cannot force a primary for the line unless the Party authorizes it or you are a member of the Party, the best you can do is force a write-in primary. Ultimately fusion voting is all about location, location, location. Each of the three minor lines has a certain number of people who will vote for the candidate on that line no matter what, Independence and Con lines carry about 2-3% each, guaranteed, and Working Families 1-2%. Numerous close elections are decided solely on which candidate gets the Independence line. The lines are also useful in getting people who would never vote for a Democrat to vote for you on another line, if you look at Spitzer's numbers on the Ind line, especially in Upstate, he was putting up numbers comparable to Perot and Golisano on the line, and that was the only lines they had. Fusion voting is a major part of NY politics for better or worse, but I'm not necessarily sure it is a good idea for anywhere else.

Seems to work..

Upstatenydem is right that these lines are actually controlled by minor party bosses (I live in upstate NY, too).  As such they can be corrupting because of the kind of game playing they produce, which is a big problem in  NY to begin with.    Believe me, there is absolutely nothing at all progressive about "bossism" -- that is something to be overcome, not encouraged, and one of the biggest, if not the biggest, blights historically of NY politics.          

I personally feel these third  parties are a serious problem for New York and there is actually talk in the legislature  of ending ballot fusion.   It should.  It's bad for major parties and it's bad for minor parties.   They mainly work to benefit incumbents, never insurgents.    Only two states have ballot fusion and  there is a real reason for that and it is not some Republican conspiracy against progressives.   No minor party has ever gained stature because of ballot fusion -- it  doesn't work for them in the long run, either.    The Greens did not cross endorse Democrats, and they got father along than the Working Families Party, despite the fact the WFP was massively funded by unions.

I would also alert Democrats and progressives outside NY that the WFP has a VERY checkered history.  They are willing to cross endorse ring wing Republicans and have done so.  (This is an example of the game  playing I refer to.)   In the last election they endorsed  Spano, a Republican,  for State Senate.  He picked up 3,000 votes on the WFP line which put him over the top.  

This was just awful, because we are only 4 seats away from  taking control of the State Senate.  NY is very artificially gerrymandered.   If Democrats could take control of the State  Senate, we could draw up a clean map of  Congressional Districts and  put FOUR Republican congressmen out  of their totally artificial seats -- there is no excuse for them being there -- NY has a 3-2 Democratic Party registration advantage, and they does not include independent voters, who also mainly vote liberal.   Four seats in the House would take us a lot closer to making Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House.    

Still think fusion is a good idea?

If liberal and progressives really want to do something positive, they need to get behind Instant Run Off Voting.   People then would feel free to  make a clean statement of principle of what they really want, and potentially build their own alternative party up,  without the risk of delivering the seat to some vicious reactionary.   And it would create the kind of pressure on wayward Democrats that fusion is alleged to do, but actually does not.    If anybody really thinks fusion is a good idea, they should compare the NY Legislature against almost any other state.    It can't be defended.

I would note Governor Dean has endorsed IRV.   He's an awfully smart politicians and we ought to be paying attention.  If we had IRV in Florida in 2000 Gore would be President today.  I have never seen a single person disputed that proposition.   But how  would  ballot fusion contributed to rectifying that situation?  Fusion would have changed nothing at all.   So why this interest in fusion?  Ballot fusion is a distraction.  Work for IRV.

Another possible problem with fusion voting is that third parties can lose their ideological positions over time and simply degenerate into patronage mills.  That's what happened to the Liberal Party.  Founded in the Depression as a way for Jewish voters to vote for FDR without voting for Tammany, the Liberal Party about 25 years ago or so under the leadership of Ray Harding degenerated into a patronage mill.  Without the Liberal Party endorsement, Rudy Guiliani would never have beaten Dinkens in 93 and as payback, one of Harding's sons became deputy mayor!  One of the reasons why the Working Families party was founded in 1998 was to kick the Liberals off of the ballot and become the "true" progressive party.  In 2002 they succeeded, and unless the Liberals succeed in getting a candidate who can garner 50k votes, they'll stay off the ballot (like the Greens who also got knocked off in 2002 for the same reason).

That being said, as a New York voter I LOVE fusion voting.  As a progressive liberal Dem, I have problems with the direction that the Dems have taken the last couple of decades.  At the same time, I have big problems with progressives who routinely let the perfect be the enemy of the good and mistake Dems for "evil Republicans"!  Voting for Al Gore and Hillary in 2000 and for Kerry and Schumer in 2004 on the Working Families line, I feel, has enabled to register my support for liberal/progressive politics while adding a vote to the Dem candidates in case they need it against a Republican (instead of wasting my vote).  Although by no means perfect, I find the Working Families Party a good vehicle for voting for my values and political principles as well as voting pragmatically for the good as opposed to the perfect.

The party, since its formation in 1998, has already accomplished a great deal.  We're not far in NYS from having a living wage law, and in several counties and municipalities across the state we already have such laws (in large part because of the ballot line access that Row E provides to politicians who want to attract voters besides straight-ticket voters of their parties).  Perhaps the most striking coup, though, was the defeat of the Albany County Dem machine's district attorney last year over the Rockefeller Drug Laws.  Dems are also now making serious noises about reforming these draconian laws, which they weren't at all doing a few years back (being largely afraid of being tared and feathered as "soft on crime" by Republican opponents.)  Now Republicans may still accuse them of being this, but Dems who stand for changing the laws know that they'll be rewarded with ballot line access and volunteers, money, etc. from Working Families.

To sum up, fusion voting at its best in NYS has led to a more ideologically honest politics, where Dem candidates are not afraid to be liberals and Republicans are not afraid either to be true conservatives or fuzzy moderates.  IMHO, this is how politics should be and often isn't in this country--driven by focus groups, and petty non-ideological symbolism about school uniforms and V-chips and the like.  At its worst, as in the case of the Liberals (and now the Conservatives), it degenerates into political patronage mills, where parties hold their noses and endorse for 3 times in a row candidates (like Pataki) who aren't "conservative" enough, simply to hold onto valuable patronage for their party hacks.

The New York Working Families Party is the most robust, independent progressive electoral entity in the nation. That is why we're trying to change the Massachusetts' election laws to allow fusion voting and set the stage to create a similar organization. Visit www.massballotfreedom.com for more info!

The effort is on to re-legalize fusion in Massachusetts. A coalition of 26 community and labor organizations is currently conducting a ballot initiative to restore the "lost tool of democracy" to the Bay State. learn more by visiting us at www.massballotfreedom.com