Electoral fusion allows smaller parties to pool their votes. For the minor parties, endorsing a major candidate ensures its survival and allows it to influence a candidate’s platform. For candidates, it allows them to sometimes get crucial votes that provide the margin of victory in a close election. Also called Open Ballot Voting, fusion voting allows multiple parties to “cross endorse” a candidate for office.
Fusion voting is working so well in New York and other states that it is beginning to enjoy a revival. Connecticut reinstituted it. Massachusetts is studying reinstating it.
But contrary to this national trend, South Carolina came by its fusion voting accidentally, and has been trying to expel it from its body politic ever since, including a legislative attempt to kill it last year.
The latest attempt is its poison-pill “sore loser” code that the legislature is trying to enforce against Eugene Platt, the Green Party candidate for a South Carolina House seat. Because Platt failed to win the endorsement of the Democratic Party, the South Carolina Election Commission decided that Platt was ineligible to appear on the ballot under the Green Party banner.
The ACLU has filed a lawsuit today to put Platt on the ballot in November on the Green Party line.
Bryan Sells, a senior staff counsel with the ACLU Voting Rights Project, has never seen the “sore loser” code enforced the way South Carolina is seeking to do.
“The Green Party just had its nominee vetoed by Democrats,” he said. “They’ve had the rug pulled out from under them. If I lived in that district and I support Eugene Platt, I’d be mad as hell.”
Platt won the nomination of a recognized party but is being bounced. Not only is the effort anti-democratic, it changes party power, party dynamics in really pernicious ways. Fusion increases democratic choices that voters have. But fusion voting, combined with this so-called “sore loser” code, reduces those choices.
August 7th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
By this logic, Strom Thurmond, whom ran under the label Dixiecrat after failing to influence the platform of the Democratic Party and failing to secure his own nomination, would have been unable to run since he had tried and failed to secure nomination in another party.
August 8th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
i think Nader got on the California ballot for Presidential election 2008, not under the Independent party(which required a significant petiton/signatures/action), but some other ‘already existing’ party that voted Ralph as their candidate..therefore he is on the ballot there. Giving the California voters at least an option…I guess that too is a fusion vote or cross endorsement.
wild
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:25 pm
A person should be able to vote for anyone they choose, irrespective of party.
Independents and those who may not be part of a majority party have their voting righs ignored —so that if your candidate is a Green Party candidate—more often than not you will not see him or her on the ballot and if you do then you are required to vote for all one party.
In other states —-you might vote for a democrate, a republican and other parties all on the same ticket—that does not seem to be the case in backward South Carolina.