Fusion voting, RCV for overseas/military voters, and timely links
The Expand Democracy 3
Happy Halloween - and happy Election Day on November 4th for many Americans. Rob wrote the latest edition of The Expand Democracy 3 this week, with a big boost from Eveline. We continue to highlight promising pro-democracy ideas and news at the local, national, and global levels.
Next week, Nivea will help us launch the first episode of our new podcast, The Democracy Lab. Every two weeks, we will release a new Expand Democracy 3, accompanied by a new Democracy Lab and a standalone post in the weeks between. As a reminder, Expand Democracy is a charitable organization, and your tax-deductible donations are essential for us to succeed. You can also support our work by subscribing to this Substack. Thank you!
#1. Deep Dive: How fusion voting and ranked choice voting work best together
[Source: Freepik]
My experience in the electoral reform arena over the last 35 years has revealed a painful truth: it’s all too easy for backers of different reforms to act like a circular firing squad rather than finding a way to move forward together. A recent example is how some advocates of fusion voting view it as a competitor to ranked choice voting (RCV). I want to lay out how using fusion voting and RCV together enhances their impact.
Here’s an explainer on fusion voting from Ballotpedia. Most simply, a candidate can run with the nomination of more than one political party. In the century of American elections preceding the widespread use of government-printed ballots, fusion candidacies were straightforward – it simply required political entities to be well-organized, communicate with one another, and list the same candidate on their party-printed ballots. But once the government introduced printed ballots and regulated what voters see, most states banned fusion voting so that candidates had to run with only one nomination.
Two state fusion bans happened more recently: South Carolina with a unanimous vote of its legislature in 2022, and Delaware in 2011 with only two dissenting votes. Today, Connecticut and New York use what has been called “disaggregated fusion”, where a candidate is listed separately for each nomination earned, while Mississippi, Oregon, and Vermont allow “aggregated fusion,” where candidates can list more than one nomination after their name, typically with the order of parties by their choice.
In New York, which has the most enduring use of fusion, the party system has solidified around two major parties and two minor parties: the Working Families Party, with a platform generally to the left of the Democratic Party, and the Conservative Party, with a platform generally to the right of the Republican Party (with any new prospective parties facing huge challenges to secure party status). This system means that Zohran Mamdani is appearing on two ballot lines in the New York City mayoral race, as the nominee of the Democrats and the Working Families Party. Republican Party mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa chose not to accept the Conservative Party nomination, while Andrew Cuomo is running as an independent.
While its impact at times is overstated, fusion voting is valuable. Most obviously, it allows a form of multi-party politics, with political identities growing from the usual political binary. More candidates will also engage in conversations with minor party leaders to secure their nominations, as those nominations are typically decided by a party’s central committee. It also provides voters with more information.
The tensions between fusion advocates and backers of RCV are both philosophical (fusion is presented as “party-centric” and RCV as “candidate-centric”) and practical (fusion advocates prefer disaggregated fusion, which creates a messy-looking ballot when combined with RCV). However, I see a clear path forward by advancing RCV with aggregated fusion—a combination we almost won in Oregon last year.
This year’s New York City mayoral election is a good example of what RCV and fusion can do together. RCV is only used in the primary in New York City, but that use is momentous - and intriguingly, the Working Families Party made particularly effective use of it in the primary by endorsing a slate of candidates, with three of those candidates (Mamdani, Brad Lander, and Adrienne Adams) having more votes than Andrew Cuomo when paired head-to-head. Because of the ballot design issues, however, the charter commission that placed RCV for primaries on the ballot in 2019 narrowly voted against using RCV in November - but that lack of fusion is creating far too much conversation now about split votes and candidate withdrawal rather than the substance of what the candidates bring to the table and incentivizing them to build majority support. Indeed, New York State has a long history of fusion voting enabling minor party candidacies who caused unrepresentative outcomes, most notoriously in the state’s U.S. Senate election in 1970 and 1980.
While mitigating the spoiler problem, RCV would give minor parties the great advantage of more often choosing to run true champions of their issues. Some might dismiss this value as “candidate-centric”, but I disagree. “Movement candidates” have been extremely important for mobilizing and defending issues for voters, whether it be Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the modern era, or Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson in the 1980s. Candidates can bring a party to life and bring voters into it. But fusion parties in New York routinely nominate “lesser of two evils” candidates to avoid splitting the vote, which undercuts their ability to grow and move the electorate their way.
I suspect fusion advocates will have tough sledding if they expect to win it politically on their own. Lawsuits offer an intriguing path forward, however, and if those are won, the debate over how to achieve fusion will intensify. I’m hoping reformers can find a way to row in the same direction.
#2. Spotlight: Ranked Choice Balloting for Military and Overseas Voters as an Institutional Safeguard for Democratic Participation
[Source: Federal Voting Assistance Program]
Military and overseas voters face structural barriers to full electoral participation due to geographical distance, security constraints, and unpredictable mail timelines. These challenges are particularly salient in jurisdictions that hold rapid run-off elections or multiple rounds of tabulation. In such contexts, ballots transmitted from abroad often arrive too late to be counted in subsequent rounds, resulting in de facto disenfranchisement despite the voter’s intent and participation.
As detailed comprehensively in a report this year by FairVote, Veterans for All Voters, and We the Veterans ranked choice ballots provide a proven administrative solution. By enabling voters covered under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) to rank candidates in advance, election officials can tabulate their preferences through all rounds of counting without requiring additional ballot submissions. This mechanism maintains ballot validity through elimination rounds, protecting the democratic rights of service members and overseas citizens from logistical delays. Currently, six states — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina — utilize ranked-choice ballots for UOCAVA voters to mitigate the limitations associated with runoff elections.
Notably, as Governing reported in 2024, several states acting to prohibit RCV for their elections preserved RCV ballots for military and overseas voters, citing operational necessity and fairness considerations. Additional research emphasizes that traditional run-off systems disproportionately depress participation among overseas and military voters due to return-mail deadlines, while advance ranking significantly reduces this participation gap.
In a time of intense affective and partisan polarization, bipartisan support for ranked choice ballots for UOCAVA voters is a practical, stability-enhancing reform. It demonstrates how administrative innovations can enhance democratic inclusion without altering election outcomes - and the foolishness of painting all uses of RCV with the same broad brush, but instead being ready to make use of its value in certain uses.
#3. Timely Links
“The Need to Reimagine the American Election System of the Future”: An essay from the NYU Democracy Project by Josh Sellers discusses how political realignment is weakening the predictable partisan effects of election rules, creating a rare moment when neither party clearly benefits from blocking reforms. This creates an opportunity for bipartisan improvements to election administration and voter access.
“A Year Ahead of the Midterms, Americans’ Dim Views of Both Parties”: A new Pew Research Center report finds Americans are broadly disillusioned with both major parties heading into the midterms, with many saying neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party represents their views. The report also finds sharp internal frustration, especially among Democrats who feel their party has failed to push back effectively on GOP-led initiatives.
“States Step Up as Washington Stalls”: The report from the Brennan Center for Justice argues that with Congress paralyzed and federal aid programs stalling, state governments are stepping in as arenas of reform and resistance using their constitutions and courts to protect rights and advance democracy.
“Filings in campaign finance court battle argue Maine has legal right to regulate super PACs”: From the Maine Morning Star - “The next piece of the puzzle for the group hoping to get the U.S. Supreme Court to establish greater regulations on money in elections was laid on Wednesday…One of the briefs is from Attorney General Aaron Frey on behalf of the state of Maine. The other is from the committee behind the referendum and the non-profit Equal Citizens, spearheaded by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, who has been attempting to bring this issue to the high court for years.”
“The Case for National Primary Day”: Caroline Tolbert and Rob Boatright wrote for the NYU Democracy Project’s “100 Ideas” series advocating for a single “National Primary Day” for all primaries. With less than 20% voter turnout and an electorate skewed toward older, wealthier, and more extreme voters, this shift could increase turnout, broaden representation, simplify mobilization, and reduce the influence of narrow interest groups.
Fair Representation for Greenbelt Starts with Ranked Choice Voting: Greenbelt’s at-large plurality system, where voters select up to seven council members and candidates need a 40% threshold to win, disproportionately allows a cohesive minority voting bloc to control all seats, diluting Black and Latino majority representation. It suggests switching to RCV, lowering the threshold to approximately 12.5%, and redistributing preferences to promote more equitable and diverse council representation.