In competitive races today, voting for a minor party can feel futile or worse — by helping elect someone’s least favored candidate. Some voters might accept this tradeoff to bring attention to the minor party’s priorities, but with fusion, voters don’t have to make this sacrifice. Fusion voting allows a minor party to elevate their policy agenda without the downside risk, offering their ballot line to the competitive candidate willing to advocate for their priorities. Because election results reveal the support a candidate earns from each nominating party’s ballot line, a minor party that delivers a meaningful share of the vote total can encourage a candidate to support its policy goals. Greater visibility into the ideological diversity throughout the electorate could, in turn, allow groups marginalized under current rules to exert more power in the political process.

Despite widespread frustration with the two major parties, voters today are nonetheless required to support one of them to cast their ballot for a competitive candidate. When candidates can compete for and earn multiple nominations, voters are freed from this binary, and can instead cast a meaningful vote on the ballot line of a minor party more aligned with their political worldview. With the option to select from more than one nominating party, voters have a greater choice of policy platforms and priorities. This could be particularly meaningful for voters in the political center who want to support moderate candidates committed to democracy and the rule of law, but are concerned about some positions of the nominating major party.

Allowing minor parties to play a more prominent and additive role could improve our two-party system and better reflect the electorate’s ideological diversity. This modest change could reduce the degree to which political conflict is perceived as a zero-sum, existential battle between two hegemonic groups. And even modestly reducing cross-partisan hatred (known as “affective polarization”) could have a host of benefits, such as making it easier for moderate officials to temper extremism on their own side. Fusion could also serve as a bridge to a more proportional system of representation, where the number of votes a party receives would lead to corresponding number of seats they win. Experts assert that moving beyond just two competitive parties in the U.S. could allow for a more fluid and responsive political system, as well as better and more representative governance.

An authoritarian movement lacking majority support in the electorate can nonetheless win at the ballot box when the pro-democracy majority splinters. Building and sustaining an ideologically diverse electoral coalition is always difficult, but fusion can make it easier by empowering factions with differing views on policy but a shared commitment to liberal democracy to unify in support of a single candidate — while separate ballot lines allow them to preserve their distinctive identities and priorities. 

Just the opposite! Under anti-fusion laws, the only way for minor parties to participate in elections is to nominate a candidate who is not supported by any other party. There is always a risk that the addition of a third (or fourth) candidate will fracture the electorate and help elect someone else opposed by most voters. Fusion makes this outcome less likely by giving a minor party another option: instead of running a third candidate who might splinter the vote, it can jointly nominate the same candidate supported by another party. Of course, minor parties are not required to cross-nominate—they remain free to nominate standalone candidates if they prefer—but fusion allows for a constructive and collaborative strategy not possible under anti-fusion laws.

The short answer is that the two major parties wanted to stifle political competition from new and burgeoning parties. Until the end of the 19th century, elections were administered with ballots printed by the political parties themselves. Fusion was common, as multiple parties would simply list the same candidate on their respective ballots. At the turn of the century, state governments, for the first time, asserted meaningful regulatory control over party administration, candidate nomination, and ballot access. While some of these reforms addressed legitimate problems with the prior system, new laws prohibiting fusion voting did not. Rather, state lawmakers enacted anti-fusion laws to reduce the influence of minor parties and entrench the existing majority party from future competition.

In some states, statutes bar fusion voting directly, such as by prohibiting a candidate from receiving more than one nomination or having their name appear on the ballot twice. In others, state law prohibits fusion voting indirectly, such as by regulating party primary rules so as to render it impossible for a candidate to obtain two nominations. State legislatures could revise or repeal these statutes to re-authorize fusion voting. Alternatively, a judicial decision holding that a state’s anti-fusion laws are unconstitutional could prevent their enforcement and require the legislature to revise the election code to permit cross-nominations in future elections.

No. Re-legalizing fusion voting would simply allow minor parties to nominate their preferred candidate when that candidate also secures a nomination from another party. Minor parties would remain free, as they are today, to nominate a candidate who does not have the backing of another party. In fact, the Green Party and Libertarian Party in New York typically nominate their own standalone candidates — even though New York law allows them to cross-nominate competitive candidates.

In 1997, a divided U.S. Supreme Court in Timmons rejected a challenge to Minnesota’s anti-fusion laws under the U.S. Constitution. Three justices dissented, concluding that the freedom of association was impermissibly burdened by laws preventing one party from nominating its preferred candidate simply because the candidate was also supported by another party. In the pending New Jersey case, the issue is whether the state anti-fusion laws violate the New Jersey Constitution, which provides more robust political rights than afforded under the federal Constitution. The Timmons majority opinion has limited persuasive value on this state law question, given that state courts have an independent duty to determine whether state laws comply with state constitutional protections. State courts routinely sustain state constitutional challenges on issues where a contrary conclusion has been reached in a federal constitutional suit.

The process described above is called “disaggregated” fusion, because when a candidate receives two nominations, each appears separately on the ballot, allowing voters to specify the party they support and providing a separate accounting for each party’s subtotal within a candidate’s overall vote sum. Several states, such as Oregon, Vermont, and California (for presidential elections only), allow candidates to be nominated by more than one party, but the nominations are combined on the ballot in a way that prevents voters from specifying their preferred party. As a result, election results do not provide transparency into party-by-party breakdown of a candidate’s support. This process is known as “dual labeling” or “aggregated” fusion.

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Fusion voting and ranking candidates are distinctly different electoral reforms. Fusion voting is simply the right of political parties to nominate whoever they choose in partisan elections, including the possibility of one candidate being nominated by multiple parties. On the other hand, ranked-choice voting is a different way of casting and counting votes, irrespective of how candidates were nominated. Ranked-choice voting can even be used in elections without partisan nominations, or in primary elections. Some scholars believe that, among options for reform that do not disturb the existing winner-take-all framework, fusion voting shows particular promise in facilitating the growth and influence of new political parties and the corresponding benefits to the overall political system.

American Enterprise Institute, “Conservatives Should Look More Closely at Systemic Election Reforms”

Brennan Center for Justice, “More Choices, More Voices: A Primer on Fusion”

Cato Institute, “The First Amendment and Fusion Voting”

Center for American Progress, “It’s Time to Talk About Electoral Reform”

Demos, “Fusion Voting: An Analysis”

New America, “The Case for Fusion Voting and a Multiparty Democracy in America”

New America, “The Realistic Promise of Multiparty Democracy in the United States”

Rainey Center for Public Policy, “Free Speech on the Ballot: The Case for Fusion”

Hon. Lynn Adelman, Idaho Law Review, “The Misguided Rejection of Fusion Voting by State Legislatures and the Supreme Court”

Peter H. Argersinger, American Historical Review, “‘A Place on the Ballot’: Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws”

Elissa Berger, Brooklyn Law Review, “A Party That Won’t Spoil: Minor Parties, State Constitutions, and Fusion Voting”

Richard L. Hasen, Supreme Court Review, “Entrenching the Duopoly: Why the Supreme Court Should Not Allow the States to Protect the Democrats and Republicans from Political Competition”

John Van Vliet, Insider NJ, “Clearing up the Confusion Around Fusion”

Bill Galston, Wall Street Journal, “Fusion Voting Could Lower the Temperature”

Blake Hounshell, N.Y. Times, “Does Fusion Voting Offer Americans a Way Out of the Partisan Morass?”

Blake Hounshell, N.Y. Times, “New Jersey Centrists Seek to Legalize Their Dream: The Moderate Party”

Maurice Mitchell & Dan Cantor, The Nation, “In Defense of Fusion Voting”

Tom Rogers, Newsweek, “The Presidential Election Needs More Parties, Not More Candidates”

Jennifer Rubin, Wash. Post, “Could a New Political Party Defang Radical Politicians?”

Talib Visram, Fast Company, “Why Pro-Democracy Advocates Want to Bring Back This Electoral System from the 1800s”