What role for “fusion voting”? Limitations and a potential “open” improvement

It was not something I ever would have predicted, but so-called fusion voting is making a comeback, at least as an option that some American electoral reformers are advocating or suggesting should be considered. In the form that advocates generally prefer, “fusion” allows a candidate to be endorsed by two or more political parties, with each of the endorsing parties having its own ballot line or other way in which voters can indicate which endorsing party they favor. This is often called “disaggregated” fusion, because the contribution from each party to the candidate’s total is transparent. It is thus distinct from an “aggregated” version in which a candidate may be formally endorsed by multiple parties but there is no way to differentiate which party a given vote may have come from.¹ Whenever I refer to “fusion” in the rest of this entry, I will mean the “disaggregated” version unless I indicate otherwise. [See text at bottom for footnotes; the intra-post links are not working for some reason.]

The purpose of this planting is to express a somewhat nuanced and qualified support for the idea, alongside a healthy dose of skepticism that it can deliver what its advocates claim to want, and–this being Fruits & Votes–some comparative (non-USA) perspectives and a potential modification that draws from the practice of open-list systems. I think my open-list version of fusion overcomes one of the main problems I identify with standard fusion models. Of course, I do not claim it does not have its own problems or that it is the system folks should now rally behind. The purpose here is just to have a “think piece” and stimulate conversation.

It is possible that in some quarters I have been placed into a “pro-fusion” camp (and at the same time an “anti-RCV” camp). I do not see myself that way (with respect to either “fusion” or “RCV”), but I suspect the perception comes from the recent report I wrote, along with Jack Santucci and Michael Latner, for Protect Democracy and APSA on electoral-system reform options for the USA. In that piece, we suggest fusion as an option for offices that, absent even more fundamental institutional reform, must remain single-seat (like Senate and popularly elected executive offices). However, and crucially, we made the case for fusion only alongside the adoption for the US House of open-list PR (and thus multi-seat districts). At least that is how I understand what we wrote, and it is what I personally intended when working on the essay. In other words, not to endorse fusion for the House or for other offices independently, but as part of the adoption of OLPR. You, of course, can read the report yourself and see if you think we suggest something different from what I am saying here. (We also do indeed give some reasons why STV–which uses RCV ballots–is not the best choice for the US House, in our assessment.)

The logic of fusion for single-seat contests alongside OLPR where practical is that both do–or are capable of doing–the same thing, which is pooling votes across candidates or parties that present a joint slate for election. This is the limited way in which I think so-called fusion voting is useful. Like any form of election via lists, it pools votes in the process of determining winners. In multi-seat districts with proportional representation, it obviously allows any given list potentially to win more than one seat, but regardless of how many it wins, it lets a group of candidates share votes because, prior to the election, a list was structured over which votes pool. In the case of OLPR, this means votes for any of the individual candidates on the list are summed up to determine a list total before the application of the PR method to determine how many seats the list as a whole wins in the district. Similarly, disaggregated fusion means that votes are cast for distinct parties (or for typically for the same candidate appearing on different ballot lines for each endorsing party) and are then summed up, that is pooled, to determine which list of parties endorsing a common candidate has the plurality in the single-seat district.

Based on how the winner of a contest is determined, “disaggregated fusion” belongs to the wider family of pooling systems, and I would much rather that its name be something that reflected this aspect of the rule, rather than highlighting the “fusion” aspect of the vote itself. In my own published work as well as from time to time on this blog, I use the term “fusion” (or “fused vote”) to refer to cases in which a vote for president and a vote for assembly–or any other set of two or more distinct offices–are cast through the same voter choice. In a sense, the use of the term, fusion, in the US refers to something quite different: a vote for Party A is also, in effect, a vote for Party B if they have nominated the same candidate on different lines of the ballot for the same office. The point is that in plain electoral-system terminology, this is pooling not fusion! Nonetheless, the name, fusion, is well established in the US (albeit probably nowhere else), and so I will go on using it, despite my reservations and preference for some alternative name that invokes the rule’s process of determining an election winner.²

Ultimately, what makes me skeptical about so-called fusion voting is precisely that only a single candidate can be on the ballot despite the vote being pooled across a list of parties. We might even say it is normal pooling electoral rules turned on their head. In OLPR, votes for different candidates pool to one party or alliance list. In American fusion voting, votes for different parties pool to a single candidate. It is pooling either way, but the direction of vote flows is reversed. And therein lies a critical problem, if one of our objectives is to foster multipartism without PR, in the service of some wider goals for improving democracy (and assuming PR is not a viable option, at least at present). 

To put it simply, fostering new parties is hard when those parties are inhibited from having their own candidates on the ballot and appealing for votes. Disaggregated fusion lets the parties get their names on the ballot, but the actual process of electing a winner for a given office remains candidate-centered, typically around the candidate of a major party. The small parties are reduced to being “vote funnels” for one of the major parties, but have little opportunity to advance themselves as alternatives. Or they can do so only to the extent that they retain “blackmail” potential whereby they withhold their “fusion” endorsement from whichever major party their votes are closer to, threatening to play spoiler.

It is plausible that the spoiler threat is more credible–thereby inducing policy concessions from a major party–when a small party has a ballot line and can decide whether or not to play the fusion game, contest by contest. In that sense fusion may be a step forward in terms of leverage for minor parties compared to the status quo where fusing (aligning and then pooling votes) is not an option. (The only option is to stand down entirely.) But it is more credible only in the sense that building a multiparty system in the absence of PR requires being willing to be a spoiler at times. You don’t build a new party by being afraid of spoiling, you build it by giving voters a reason to prefer you to the existing major parties and by recruiting candidates to run under your label. A big problem with fusion is it short-circuits the candidate-recruitment side of party building inasmuch as the usual role of the smaller party in a fusion system will be simply to funnel its votes towards a major party candidate that they are unlikely to have had any role in selecting.³ 

The biggest advantage of fusion, in its disaggregated form, and one that advocates often bring up is information. It is said to make clear to the winner, and the public, how much of a candidate’s support came from one party’s voters and how much came from another. In this way, it serves a purpose similar to ranked-choice voting where preference flows can be used to determine the electoral coalition that brought the winner to office. (Again, fusion does this via pooling votes; by contrast, the various forms of RCV do this through “transferable votes.”) A recent Protect Democracy report advocating fusion voting for presidential elections demonstrates the point by showing cases of state-level votes for president over the years in which the winner of the state’s electoral votes needed the votes cast on a minor-party line in order to defeat the other major-party competitor. For example, in New York in 1944, the Republican ballot line had more votes than the Democratic line, 47%–39%, but the latter party’s nominee (FDR) won because the votes cast on the American Labor line (8%) and for the Liberal Party (5%) pooled to FDR to give him the electoral votes. Also worth calling attention to here is Reagan beating Carter for the 1980 electoral votes of New York, despite Democratic votes (44%) being greater than Republican (43%). Reagan also benefitted from pooled Conservative votes (4%), while the Liberal Party (8%) chose the blackmail/spoiler route instead by endorsing John Anderson rather than Carter. 

So fusion can work to demonstrate vote flows and also leave a small party the option of not pooling its votes with a major party. But is it worth the trouble? Maybe. As I noted, it may generate some incentives to form new parties that would not otherwise be present, and once the parties are in the system they may be willing to withhold endorsement (fusion) now and then and advance on their own to the general election, like the NY Liberals in 1980. But it is a far cry from any system in which new parties are encouraged to advance their own candidates and have them on the general-election ballot where they can effectively build the brand and make a case for the alternative they represent yet without being spoilers. 

I will not go further into the cases in the USA where fusion is currently used and what impacts it has had. There are other authors to whom the interested reader can turn for that. I will note, however, that while New York has had disaggregated fusion for a long time, and does indeed have other party labels with current or past ballot lines (e.g., Working Families, Right to Life, Conservative, Liberal), I certainly do not think of New York as standing out as having a flourishing multiparty system on account of fusion. These minor parties play some role in the political process, but it is mostly as vote funnels for Democrats or Republicans. So the notion that fusion, on its own, will foster a multiparty system strikes me as wishful thinking. The notion that it may be a path to adoption of proportional representation seems even more fantastical. Does NY even have a PR movement that is notably stronger than in other states? If so, it certainly can’t claim to have been successful at it.

In spite of this, a recent spate of articles has discussed fusion and advocated for it either forthrightly or conditionally. Lee Drutman had a piece for New America in 2022; the main point is that fusion is beneficial in its own right, but on p. 21 Drutman also advances the notion that its adoption might bring about a “moderate” party whose presence in the system could be “leveraged to support broader changes in the political system that would break the “two-party doom loop” and end the zero-sum nature of American partisan competition, such as proportional representation through multi-member districts.” As I noted already, I have serious doubts that fusion is in any way a path to PR (even if I am on record saying it could be worth adopting for single-winner races along with PR for the House). Drutman’s case for fusion is mostly that it would be a way to promote a centrist party that could fuse (pool) with, in principle, whichever of the major parties had the more “moderate” nominee. Steven Hill offered a critique of Drutman’s piece, in which one point that resonates with my argument here is that the New York Green Party rejects fusion because it sees it as “cover” for the big parties in a “horse trading” game among political machines rather than a way to build an alternative brand. Then Drutman had a further response in which he argued fusion was the more “party-centered” option than RCV. (I noted above that I see fusion as remaining fundamentally candidate-centered.⁴) Then Hill had a further response, the main point of which is captured by the subtitle: “Fusion yes, but more study of modern-day uses needed,” specifically noting that many of the claimed benefits of fusion have not been not clearly substantiated. He reiterates his view that “RCV” is better for building a multiparty system. (I am skeptical of the latter claim, but that’s beside the point for this planting.) I am not going to attempt to summarize all the points these two authors make, but anyone interested in understanding the debate over fusion should read them all. 

More recently, Protect Democracy has come out with the report I already mentioned above, suggesting the adoption of fusion for presidential elections–at the state level for electors. It is a thoughtful piece and I recommend it, but ultimately it encapsulates most of my reasons for being skeptical about fusion. A central thesis is captured by this quote from the introduction: “By empowering factions with differing views on policy but a shared commitment to liberal democracy to unify in support of a single candidate, fusion can serve as a key tool for defeating authoritarian threats at the ballot box.” The introduction specifically mentions possible third-party or independent candidates for 2024 like Cornel West or a nominee of “No Labels” (which is, of course, a label). My skepticism lies in whether potential third-party presidential candidates are committed to liberal democracy as their main animating purpose, and would be content to be vote funnels for Democrat Joe Biden in order to stop Donald Trump, or whether their main purpose is to make a point, try to get into debates, and advertise themselves. Maybe they, or key supporters, actually want to be spoilers. And then there’s the question of whether Biden would even want to have his name listed along with a party that featured Cornel West as its most prominent national figure. (Fusion rules permit the big party, or its nominee, to reject the candidate’s name being on a ballot line with which they do not want to be associated.⁵) Fusion seems like a potential dead end to me, at least so long as the minor parties do not exist with avenues for development and influence through actually electing their own people to office and participating in legislative coalitions–something that PR for the House (and state legislatures) would facilitate, of course.

To what extent does disaggregated fusion exist anywhere else? Is it just an “exceptional” American curiosity? As I said above, if we think about it as part of a wider family of pooling electoral rules, obviously pooling exists anywhere that has list PR. But I mean more narrowly, as a means of facilitating pre-election alliances between parties that jointly nominate the same candidate for some office. Of course, pre-electoral coalitions are not unheard of in single-seat contests around the world. India has them as an established feature of its politics, for example. However, they are not “fusion” because only the party name/symbol of the candidate being nominated by such an alliance in a given district appears on the ballot. Other parties in the alliance merely commit to mobilizing their supporters behind the candidate (and party) that has been granted the alliance’s nomination in the district. The alliances are public, but not on the ballot, and even if they were, voters would be voting for the “aggregated” alliance, and not selecting a party below the level of the alliance.

The cases I know of that may qualify as disaggregated fusion can be found in Latin America. For instance, Venezuelan presidential ballots in the 1958-88 period used to permit multiple parties to endorse the same presidential candidate but retain their separate ballot symbol. The parties endorsing a given presidential candidate were not grouped together, but the picture and name of the presidential candidate were included along with the party symbol on the square on the ballot that the voter would mark.⁶ I believe Mexican Chamber of Deputies elections at times have used something that could count as US-style fusion. Mexico has a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system, and parties can run separately in the list-PR component while endorsing a common candidate for a single-seat district. I recall that in some years voters could place their vote on one of the different party symbols backing a given candidate. [Details–click the link for some cool ballot images!] It is also possible that Italy has had this option in some of its elections. I hope someone can confirm or correct this.

In the end fusion as understood in the USA is rare, but not unheard of. It has some potential for allowing multiple parties to form that might not otherwise under current rules, but those parties will tend mainly to be vote funnels for a major party. The number one defect from a multipartism-fostering perspective is that the parties that are pooling votes (by “fusing” on a single candidate) do not each get their own candidate on the ballot. This seriously hampers party formation and development, especially in an electoral process that remains fundamentally candidate-centered despite the use of fusion. A final question is whether there may be a way to improve so-called fusion voting to overcome this defect. 

The most obvious improvement I can think of is to take the lead from other pooling systems and adopt open-list plurality. Call it “open fusion.” Like disaggregated fusion, the separate parties would have ballot lines, but unlike currently existing US-style fusion these parties could also have their own candidates. But by being grouped on the ballot together, it would be clear that a vote for any of them is a vote for the group. The winner is the plurality candidate within the plurality group. This is perhaps its potential biggest downside politically, in that the winner need not be the individual candidate with the most votes; this is of course true of single-winner RCV as well, when considering first-preference votes. (Two-round versions are also imaginable as a solution to this, but add complexity and cost via another voting day.⁷) Open list in single-seat districts is in use in one district in Finland and one in Peru. These countries both have open-list PR systems and thus use multi-seat districts, but each also has one district that elects only one member, while permitting lists to have more than one candidate.⁸ 

Of course, my “open fusion” model has flaws. There does not exist an electoral system with no flaws. One flaw that immediately comes to mind is the one I alluded to above: what if one of the candidates does not want any association with other parties (and now also candidates) that might like to direct votes towards him or her? Of course, no candidate would be forced to accept being part of any such group. The downside would be that no one plays the game of open fusion because no one wants to be associated with the (perceived) extremist parties that would funnel votes to a given major-party nominee. But this is already an issue with disaggregated (but “closed”) fusion, as noted earlier. Is it worse when the vote-funneling minor parties have their own candidates on the ballot instead of just a ballot slot? Maybe, but also maybe not. Perhaps parties emerge under open fusion that are more serious inasmuch as the proposed system provides incentives for pre-electoral cooperation without depriving smaller parties of the ability to show who they are–literally, by nominating a candidate and making their own case. One could imagine ways to design ballots so that voters could reject a candidate in a group (meaning their vote could not pool to the candidate so-rejected). However, this risks making such a ballot more complex and error-prone, which is precisely one of the arguments against ranked-choice ballots (see Cormack 2023 and Pettigrew and Radley 2023).

I know many readers and reform activists will say, just adopt the alternative vote (a common “RCV” system). I am not going to entertain that option here, in a planting that has already grown rather large. Suffice it to say that there are plenty of reasons to doubt “RCV” is the answer, and even if it is by some objective standard, it faces obstacles to adoption and retention. If RCV has serious problems–which not everyone agrees it does–then maybe that leaves fusion, of some sort, as long as we are stuck with single-seat district elections.⁹ As I have argued here, fusion as practiced in the few jurisdictions of the US that have used it, is not very promising as a means to foster a genuine multiparty system if adopted on its own. It has some redeeming qualities, however, and one its biggest flaws–reducing minor parties to being mostly vote funnels without their own standard-bearers–could be fixed by having an open-list system in the single-seat elections.

Notes

Something has gone fundamentally haywire today with the Word Press footnote function. I was able to save them all as text, so here they are, and I think the footnote markers above are all in the correct place with numbers. But the text for all but one of them vanished from the online editor between draft and saving/posting and an attempt to paste the text back in at the footnote markers again failed. And then for some reason, footnote 6 reappears below the following block of text as “footnote 1” even though it does not appear in my editor (or else I would edit it out). This is bizarre and frustrating. I hope WP fixes this. In the meantime, I will be back to manually placing footnotes.

1. California has this aggregated fusion. It is possible for two parties (e.g., Peace & Freedom and Green in the most recent election) to endorse the same presidential candidate. I believe both party names are then included beneath the candidate’s name, which advertises the candidate as a “fusion” candidate. However, there is only one line and one voting bubble to mark if one wants to vote for this candidate, which is what makes it “aggregated.” Oregon and Vermont have similar provisions. Apparently there is (or was, as of 2013) a possibility of aggregated fusion in the UK as well, and is an option in South Australia (where it is, of course, combined with the alternative vote, a “ranked choice” system). 
2. This is related to my general disdain for calling electoral systems “voting systems” as if voting were all they were about, as opposed to allocating political power for which voting is only one critical part of the process. 
3. They especially will not have such a role when candidate selection is via primaries. Perhaps they could attain such a role through incorporating multi-party fusion somehow in primaries. I am not sure I like this idea, let alone have any idea how it would work. So I will just leave it here as something to ponder. 
4. Whether it is more or less so than RCV is a separate question and one I will not entertain here. 
5. Drutman (2022, pp. 19–20) mentions this option of a major party refusing fusion as a reason why the rule would be unlikely to foster genuinely extreme parties (an advantage that RCV does not have, because the major party candidate is not in a position to reject individual voters ranking him or her after casting a higher preference for the extremist). 
6. These Venezuelan ballots also featured “fusion” in the sense that I have used the term in various research publications and sometimes on this blog: For each party there was both a “large card” and “small card” (all on the same ballot paper despite the term, card). The large card was for the presidential vote, as as noted fusion nominations were permitted whereby votes from different parties endorsing the same candidate would pool to determine the winner. The small card was for a series of other offices–Senate, Deputies, and state assemblies (as well as local councils before those started to be elected on a separate date)–hence being a “fused” vote in the sense that one vote counted for several distinct contests. A voter could split the ticket, but only between president and everything else, and the voter could vote for a given presidential candidate without voting for the president’s core party. 
7. For instance, if the candidate with the most votes is not in the alliance with the most votes, have a runoff between the top-voted individual and the leader of the largest alliance. I am not sure I like this, and there may be better ways to deal with it aside from simply accepting a non-frontrunner as winner. (Or such a runoff could be triggered only if the plurality alliance was short of 50% or some other (lower) threshold and/or if the leading candidate overall whose alliance total was second had not cleared some individual vote-percentage threshold. I don’t really like such complexity, but I could see some political benefit to making a second round required under some limited circumstances.)
8. Uruguay previously elected its president via such a rule. The vote was also fused in the comparative electoral systems terminology sense that I noted above: a single vote counted for a presidential candidate, the alliance of which he or she was a part, and a list of candidates for each of the two houses of the national legislature. (Especially in earlier years, the lists were actually factional, within a major party, so “alliance” can also refer to the larger party rather than a multi-party grouping. In addition, the factional lists for congress also pooled to the larger alliance/party.)  
9. Perhaps one could imagine ways of combining (disaggregated) fusion and RCV. However, it might be too complex and I will leave it as an exercise for the interested reader. (In the last piece of the multiple-essay exchange between Hill and Drutman, linked above, Hill suggests an interest in “innovative hybrids” of RCV and fusion but does not elaborate.)  

1. These Venezuelan ballots also featured “fusion” in the sense that I have used the term in various research publications and sometimes on this blog: For each party there was both a “large card” and “small card” (all on the same ballot paper despite the term, card). The large card was for the presidential vote, as as noted fusion nominations were permitted whereby votes from different parties endorsing the same candidate would pool to determine the winner. The small card was for a series of other offices–Senate, Deputies, and state assemblies (as well as local councils before those started to be elected on a separate date)–hence being a “fused” vote in the sense that one vote counted for several distinct contests. A voter could split the ticket, but only between president and everything else, and the voter could vote for a given presidential candidate without voting for the president’s core party. ↩︎