The Globe recently editorialized about how few incumbents are facing contested elections (âIncumbents Rule,â Boston Globe, June 3, 2006). With 68 percent of state Senate and Representative seats currently uncontested, Massachusetts ranks near the bottom of competitive elections in the U.S.
When politicians get a free ride, citizenâs voices are excluded from public policy.
Passage of the âBallot Freedomâ initiative would give voters a helpful tool to address the lack of competition in Massachusetts politics. Ballot Freedom would make it possible for voters to unite behind an alternative partyâs platform, but cast their vote in coalition with a major partyâs candidate.
This âopen ballotâ approach would give independent, issue-based parties the opportunity to grow, without having to ask supporters to waste their vote on a candidate who canât win. Giving new political parties more options will make our elections more competitive. Giving voters more choices will also stimulate more citizen participation.
If issue based parties have a candidate that is different from a major party candidate, you still get the scenerio where supporters are asked to “waste their vote” on a candidate.
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What is the point of having a third party if that party is only going to support candidates of major parties?
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The danger here is that we start getting elections that are less competetive as conservative Dems seek out the Republican ballot line. The state GOP is in no position to turn anyone down.
It’s really the “fringe party blackmail” proposal. The idea is that minor parties will threaten established parties with running another candidate on their line once the fringe parties have established ballot access and voter acceptance. Ironically, they will have secured this access and achieved acceptance by nominating the established party candidates in one or more past cycles.
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Then the blackmail starts. “Hey, Democrat. Unless you publicly support our platform, we’ll run Grace Ross or Jill Stein or [your name here] against you.” (Yes, a right wing fringe party could do the same thing to the Republicans.)
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Just what we don’t need — a mechanism that will push Democratic candidates to embrace positions they otherwise wouldn’t in order to protect their left flank.
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How’d that work out for us in Florida in 2000?
I realize you’re pushing one side of the debate, but in most circles this is called fusion voting. It has nothing to do with candidate choice, and everything to do with enabling narrow interests that can’t be bothered to do hard work.
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The obvious example is New York, where the Conservative Party regularly endorses the Republican candidate, in return for a slight pull to the right. If you remember, Weld’s non-endorsement from the CP was the beginning of the end for him. Consider for a moment the current position of the Republican Party in New York — do you want that for Mass. Dems?
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This is to emancipate highly organized interest groups — not offer choice for voters. Call it a super-lobby that shows up on the ballot. Like lobbyists, these new “parties” don’t want to offer a choice, but rather threaten the ones they have.
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The best example ’round here is the “Working Families Party”, who strongly supports this project. The “WFP” is a sub-set of the Democratic Party that wants a stronger hewing to a labor agenda, and fusion voting has been chosen as the method to actualize that. The WFP can thus threaten to withhold their “endorsement” — not that they’d endorse a Republican candidate — to bludgeon candidates not sufficiently loyal to labor. (Full disclosure, I am a member of the Mass. Teachers Assoc.).
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This doesn’t really do much but lower the barriers to entry into the party system. Ideological groups that don’t feel like running a candidate can instead mutter vague threats about non-endorsement if their aligned candidates don’t toe their line. For the most part, aside from a platform and a sad convention, they allow the big party to do most of the GOTV and advertising for them.
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It’s the politics of subtraction.
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If you have an agenda, build a party. Do the groundwork, raise the money, build the operation, find the candidates. Or work to change the party you must agree with from the inside. This is just free-riding on others’ work building a party, then deciding if their candidate passes a litmus test.
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For some alternative views (and definitely more positive ones!) on fusion voting, BMG readers might go to MyDD, or read David Sirotaâs take on fusion and the New York Working Families Party. Or you can learn more about the progressive impacts of the Working Families Party on New York politics in The American Prospect.
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That being said, several comments that were made in response to Randâs blog merit a response:
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Precisely because it allows voters more choices without requiring voters to waste their vote. In New York, I can vote for Pataki on the Republican line or the Conservative line, and thus send him a message about my ideology, values, issues, etc. Likewise, I can vote for Elliot Spitzer (or Hilary Clinton, etc.) on the Democratic line or the Working Families Line. Fusion allows voters more choices to express their political values, without requiring them to waste a vote on a noble but hopeless third party candidate.
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Politics is leverage. You can leverage with voters, with money, and with a ballot line (which is a form of leveraging with voters). Rich individuals leverage politics with their money. Is it worse for a group of individuals to organize to get a ballot line?
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1) I didnât see Gore moving left in response to Nader in Florida 2000. And if fusion had been legal in Florida, perhaps the Greens would have had the good sense to use their ballot line to endorse Gore and he would have won.
2) In 2004, Kerry declined to support the Florida initiative to raise the minimum wage. In November 2004, 72% of Floridians voted in favor of raising the minimum wage and Kerry lost the state.
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Building an effective minor party in America is hardly a day at the beach. And the platform of the New York WFP â living wages, universal health care, good government, and public investment in infrastructure â is hardly narrow.
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Re. Lowering the barriers to entry: There are huge barriers to organizing a minor party and getting a ballot line. Here in the Commonwealth, you have to run a candidate in a statewide election that receives 3% off the popular vote, or enroll 1% of the registered voters in your party. And if your enrollment drops below the required amount, or if you donât run a statewide candidate every two years who gets 3% of the vote, you lose your ballot line. In short, fringe groups (or parties) donât get ballot lines.
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After investing hundreds of million dollars and hundreds of million volunteer hours in the Democratic Party and its candidates, what has been the return for organized labor? NAFTA? CAFTA? Giving away the federal treasury to the rich? Sure they want the Democrats to hew to a labor agenda! So should the rest of us working stiffs that care about living wages, universal health care, public education, etc.
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Summary
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A famous economic study examines the behaviors of two ice cream stands on a beach. It concludes that the stands each have an incentive to locate themselves close to each other and to sell relatively similar products. There is no incentive for them to differentiate themselves, and by existing in proximity, they both maximize their business.
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This is the two party system. Fusion creates the opportunity for an alternative ice cream stand to set up down the beach.
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Minor parties have introduced and championed many issues that the major parties have avoided: universal suffrage, social security, and the minimum wage, to name a few. Fusion gives voice to more viewpoints and thus expands the scope of policy options that elected officials are willing to consider. And it does this within the confines of our “two party system”.
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Think of it as an American version of proportional representation.
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(Disclaimer: Iâm the campaign director of Mass Ballot Freedom Campaign http://www.massballotfreedom.com)
I say this every time this topic comes up, but I’ll say it again: Fusion voting is not useful for Massachusetts. It’s been promoted by people from New York state who didn’t understand our politics, and have sadly been putting a lot of time and effort into something we don’t need – and even more sadly, drawing a lot of election enthusiasts and reformers who could’ve been spending their time promoting the ballot reform we really do need: Instant Runoff Voting.
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In New York, municipal elections are partisan. In New York, the state legislatures are split between Republicans and Democrats, and so are many many districts. In New York, most of the elections that really matter, and set the direction of the state’s politics, are partisan general elections.
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In Massachusetts, municipal elections are nonpartisan. Elections for school board, alderman, mayor, selectman, town meeting – all of them have no party label on the ballot. Fusion voting is 100% useless in these elections.
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In Massachusetts, both houses of the legislature are solidly blue, as are the large majority of our districts. Occasionally a Republican and Democrat face off in a competitive election, but those elections are rarely the ones that matter most. The real legislative contests in Massachusetts, the ones that make a big difference, are Democratic primaries. Where every candidate has a D on the ballot. Again, Fusion voting is 100% useless in these elections.
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In Massachusetts, we have only one statewide office that is partisan-competitive: Governor. The rest are all decided in Democratic primaries. Basically, fusion voting is a reform that would affect our state meaningfully only in the election for governor, and that’s it.
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Instant runoff voting, on the other hand, solves persistent and serious problems that come up in every single election year, many many times. These problems affect any race in which more than two candidates are running. Elections for city council, primaries for state house, and yes, even the general election for governor. We desperately need IRV.
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And in the general election for Governor, if we had IRV, a third party could run a candidate and urge their voters to support the Democrat, or the Republican, or whoever else, at #2. This would have the same practical effect as fusion voting, because it would be obvious from the round-by-round results how many votes the winning candidate got from that third party candidate’s voters.
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IRV does not, however, share a serious drawback with fusion: Fusion draws people away from the large parties into the small parties. In a state like New York, where Republicans and Democrats are more evenly balanced, that has much milder effects. But think about what practical effect it would have in Massachusetts: Each ideological group whose members leave the Democratic party, loses power in Democratic primaries – and those primaries are the elections that control our state more than any other! If, for example, progressives leave the Democratic party to register for a new third party such as Working Families, sure, they’d have more influence in the general election, but who cares – the Democrats will still win enough seats to control the legislature. But in trade for that, those progressives will no longer be able to vote in Democratic primaries, so more conservative Democrats would win primaries! A lot of good it does to influence the general when it’s at the expense of losing the primary.
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Now, Fusion doesn’t require that to happen, and overall, I think fusion voting is a good thing. I hope that if we do get it here, we can still convince progressives to stay within the Democratic party, which is the most effective way to pursue change in Massachusetts.
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But we need IRV, having IRV would give us all of the advantages of fusion, and fusion is close to useless for Massachusetts.
Cos, I’d be interested to hear your take on IRV compared to Condorcet voting. I’ve long been torn between IRV and Condorcet voting, for reasons much to do with how Jesse Gordon’s campaign turned out. He was quite liked, but ended up #2 on too many ballots and was eliminated before those came into play.
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To consider a simplistic example, suppose 1000 people vote for three candidates and the votes end up like:
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401: Alice, Bob, Carol
399: Carol, Bob, Alice
200: Bob, Alice, Carol
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Under IRV, Bob is eliminated in the first round and Alice goes to win 601 to 399, even though nearly 60% of the population preferred Bob to Alice.
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In the Condorcet system, elections are determined by pairwise comparisons. Here, Bob is preferred over Carol by 601 people, and Bob is preferred over Alice by 599 people. Bob wins all pairwise comparisons, so Bob is elected.
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So, yeah, now that I’ve described why I like Condorcet, I’m curious to hear your take.
I think Condorcet is technically a better system, but it significantly increases the complexity of the voting system for little-to-no benefit.
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IRV’s failure to elect the Condorcet candidate is extremely rare. In fact, no one has yet to document case in history of IRV failing to elect the Condorcet candidate, not in San Franscisco, not in Australia, not in Ireland. I’ve challenged many a Condorcet and Approval voting advocate to document a case, and they have yet to do so. I’ve also looked at some of the raw data from Cambridge elections, in the ones I’ve looked at, if you treat them as single-winner elections, IRV and Condorcet have always agreed on the candidate.
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Secondly, IRV is a far more politically feasible system with much more momentum behind it. IRV advocates have to work very hard to explain the system is a simple and concise way. With Condorcet, this job would only become harder, especially when explaining the possibility of cyclic preferences. The job of resolving Condorcet cycles can certainly appear arbitrary and non-intuitive to the average person.
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Moreover, we have to keep our eyes on the prize. Real electoral reform will come from attaining some level of proportional representation in our legislative bodies. Probably the only way to proportional representation in the US is through STV (Cambridge-style voting), and IRV is the best single-winner gateway to STV. IRV is exactly STV when limited to one winner. Condorcet doesn’t have that benefit.
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So in short, if we were to get IRV, and if we were to get proportional representation through STV, then we could start thinking about replacing IRV with Condorcet.
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But that’s a long ways off . . .
That way, if a third party feels like running their own candidate, they can endorse a major-party candidate as #2. And if they don’t, they can endorse a major-party candidate on their own ticket.
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2. You said “The real legislative contests in Massachusetts, the ones that make a big difference, are Democratic primaries”. And that’s precisely why I am all for fusion voting. A Democratic one-party state is a lot better than a Republican state – but a state where Democratic factions would split into multiple smaller parties is even more preferrable. Only that way we will get a marketplace of ideas working for us.