Why pro-democracy advocates want to bring back this electoral system from the 1800s

Lee Drutman was quoted in the Fast Company about how fusion voting can help break the two-party doom loop.

Fusion voting was widespread in early-American history, when voters filled out ballots printed by various political parties, which could cross-nominate as they pleased. But in the 1880s, the U.S. moved to the Australian ballot system, which uses a single, government-printed ballot for all races, so states stepped in to regulate ballot design. That allowed the Republican and Democratic parties to solidify their power, and over the following decades, they gradually pushed to eliminate fusion voting in most of the country. “It’s completely pushed minor parties out of the political domain, and allowed them only to operate really as a second-class, electoral participant,” says Beau Tremitiere, counsel at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit whose mission is to prevent American government from becoming authoritarian, and which is representing two individual voters in the New Jersey lawsuit.

Even so, a political center still existed until the social and geographic realignment of the two major parties, starting in the 1960s, largely driven by the Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath. Now, it has become a uniquely and historically divided two-party system with no overlap,” wrote Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, in a September report, The Case for Fusion Voting and a Multiparty Democracy in America. We are in a “two-party doom loop,” he says, with hyper-polarization at a historic high and accelerating faster than in other democracies.

There are still many people who align with the political middle, who Drutman calls “homeless voters.” Recent polling shows 62% of Americans want a third party, because “the parties do such a poor job representing the American people,” including 63% of voters who identify as Independents, representing the largest group of potential voters in the U.S. (though most Republicans and Democrats who supported a third party wanted a more conservative or liberal one). Still, those centrists “don’t really have the ability to signal that they want something else because all they have are two choices,” Drutman says.

Drutman believes fusion voting could be a solution. “[It] is going to start getting us toward a more multiparty system, and breaking out of the binary past,” he says.

Here’s how it would work: A candidate would be “cross-nominated” by one of the major parties and an emerging minor party—such as Democrat Tom Malinowski by the Moderate Party in New Jersey—essentially building a coalition between the left or the right and the middle. With fusion voting, it’s more than simply an endorsement from the minor party, which Tremitiere says doesn’t meaningfully influence outcomes; rather, the candidate actually runs on both ballot lines. People who aren’t “diehard partisans” and feel more aligned with a centrist party may want to vote for that candidate because the party is technically running them as well. “It reaches people at the most crucial part of the voting process, which is at the ballot,” Tremitiere says.

Fusion voting could work for any race on any level. In 2010, Democrat Daniel Malloy won the Connecticut governorship thanks to the 26,000 votes cast for him on the Working Families Party line, pushing him just ahead of his Republican rival.

It also has precedent in the highest office. In 1960, John F. Kennedy was on the ballot in New York State for both the Democrats and the state’s Liberal Party. The 406,000 votes from Liberal Party ballots helped him eke out the victory over Richard Nixon, and cross the electoral college threshold. That was a time when the two parties weren’t so partisan, and the Liberal Party could plausibly have endorsed Nixon instead, Tremitiere says (the Liberal Party endorsed Republican Rudy Giuliani for New York mayor in 1993). He admits there’s no way of knowing those voters wouldn’t have cast ballots on the Democratic line anyway, but when an election is close, fusion could feasibly make the difference in deciding the winner.

Unlike those examples, where a more leftist party influenced elections, advocates now see a chance for center parties to emerge, to mobilize voters around the candidates they cross-nominate, and to drive them to the polls. They believe it could help increase turnout in general, and, at times, allow those voters to swing elections.