Organization’s Objective
With fusion, candidates’ names can appear on more than one party’s ballot line, and people can choose on which line to vote for their candidate. The votes from each party’s ballot line are tallied and reported separately, and then added together towards a candidate’s overall total. Under such a system, used commonly only in New York but with increasing frequency in Connecticut, Delaware, and South Carolina, voters can elect major-party candidates while expressing support for the issue platform associated with an independent party. Voters can clearly signal to candidates exactly what they are sending their representatives up to the statehouse or Washington to do, and they gain significantly more power to hold politicians accountable to particular issue platforms.
Our strategy takes as its starting point the belief that we need more representative political parties in this country. In America, political parties are different than advocacy groups, different than unions, different than community organizations. They are the fundamental vehicles through which we engage in democratic action, elect our political leadership, and govern our country. They get respected as such, and they have clout as such. To put it bluntly, we all know that politics is about more than just good ideas: power exists, and smart electoral reformers will not only recognize that reality but consciously seek to build new centers of power through our efforts.
Due to the winner-take-all nature of our electoral system, nearly all meaningful decision-making in American politics is mediated through the two big-tent parties. That’s a problem that hinders political innovation, discourages broad democratic debate, and disengages and disillusions millions upon millions of our citizens. That’s a problem that fusion voting helps rectify, because fusion creates the space for a limited number of serious-minded, pragmatic, and useful third parties to become viable. Fusion lowers the barriers to entry into the realm of real political power, thus broadening the playing field and encouraging democratic participation from a much wider group of players than are currently engaged.
