Is Fusion Voting Fair?

Archon Fung: Hey, you’re listening to Terms of Engagement. We’re at episode eighteen already. My name’s Archon Fung. I’m a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation here.

Stephen Richer: And I’m Stephen Richer. I’m the former elected Maricopa County recorder. And now I’m a senior practice fellow at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School.

Archon Fung: As always, we’re speaking as individuals, not on behalf of Harvard University or the Harvard Kennedy School or even the Ash Center.

Stephen Richer: And today, because it’s a holiday coming up tomorrow, we’re doing this one taped. And I’m actually coming to you from Washington, D.C. instead of Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m in one of those little boxes that cuts out the noise at one of these conference centers. It actually works pretty well. But this is my first time in one of these little boxes.

Archon Fung: That’s great. And so we will be monitoring the comments and trying to respond when we go live on Tuesday at noon. And we are recording early because Tuesday is Veterans Day. So, Stephen, you ran a half marathon, I think, over the weekend. Are you in good enough shape to acknowledge Veterans Day by doing a Veterans Day workout? And if so, what is that workout?

Stephen Richer: I don’t know. I know that there are things like the MRFs to recognize fallen soldiers, but I don’t know what the Veterans Day, the official, is there an official Veterans Day workout?

Archon Fung: I don’t think there is an official Veterans Day workout. The MRF is usually on Memorial Day. I think I’m going to do one on Veterans Day as well as Memorial Day because I think I’m going to have a little bit more time. I’m not going to come in early tomorrow.

Stephen Richer: Okay, well, don’t ask me to do any sprinting or long-distance running right now because my IT band is giving me a little bit of an issue. But I’ll do some push-ups and some sit-ups and maybe some pull-ups for you if I can find a bar.

Archon Fung: There you go. Yeah, just find a workout station.

Stephen Richer: And because it’s Monday and we’re talking on Monday, we are in the forty-first day of the federal government shutdown. Is that right? You’re usually good on the counter.

Archon Fung: I think that’s right, because we’re at thirty five thirty six the last time we heard. So we’re at forty five forty six now. Yeah. OK. Forty one. Forty one plus seven. Yeah. Forty one. Forty one.

Stephen Richer: But by the time people watch this tomorrow, it could be over with because the Senate last night voted on a necessary procedure to vote on what could be a bill to then end the federal government shutdown bill. There’s a whole lot of talk about that and maybe we’ll explore it in future episodes. But Archon, who wins? From the shutdown? If resolved at this point, who wins?

Archon Fung: So I was thinking last night, I would really like if I had the opportunity to vote, what I would base my vote on is I would want to do a bunch of focus groups and surveys with people who are getting SNAP benefits and whose ACA rates will go up to ask them. Do you want the government to start working now or would you rather your representatives, especially the Democratic Party, hold out for a little bit more till the subsidies? And I don’t know the answer to that question. There’s a lot of pain happening right now for sure. So that’s terrible. I want that to end. But then does it just prolong things and does it create more pain because the ACA subsidies go away? I don’t know. What do you think?

Stephen Richer: And then setting aside normal human beings, normal Americans, there’s also, of course, the political question of who wins politically. And we saw last night that Chuck Schumer was very much still opposed to this because I think after the last government shutdown, he felt like he had to firmly hold the line. There’s a decent amount of disagreement within the Democratic ranks right now, especially with regard to the six Democratic senators who are.

Archon Fung: I think it’s eight. Eight. Eight.

Stephen Richer: Okay, who are seemingly going to break ranks and join with the Republicans to pass a bill to allow the federal government to reopen, but that will not require an extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies.

Archon Fung: Which is the main demand that the Democrats had been articulating to justify the shutdown in the first place. My understanding is of the eight Democrats, none of them are up for reelection in 2026 and two of them have announced retirement. So whatever you want to read into that. But this is an interesting kind of dilemma because the politics for the Democratic, Capital “D” Democrats, the politics may diverge from the policy. Right. So the Democrats want ACA subsidies. They want SNAP benefits. Right. So that’s why they shut things down. But a lot of people have said, look, if they get the ACA subsidies by 2026, that’s actually not good for them in the midterm elections because politically you want all of those forty-two million people to or no, that’s the SNAP benefits. All the SNAP benefits. Getting ACA subsidies, tens of millions, I think maybe it’s seventy, would be harsher on the Republicans if their rates were going up. So the politics and the policy might.

Stephen Richer: I don’t think it’s gonna matter. I think that, as I understand it, the deal right now is a handshake to say that we will have a vote on the extension of the subsidies. And I think that that vote won’t succeed because, of course, the Democrats are still in minority positions in both chambers of Congress. And so I think that this is just an opportunity for them to tee it up and really make it a political issue. potentially going into twenty twenty six and to tell voters that, hey, we wanted to extend this. We even had the government shut down for a long period of time because this was so important to us, and we had a very clean vote on it. And of course, the Republicans didn’t do that. Now, I don’t know about sort of the political ramifications of that, but I don’t think that that will actually get through. And I think that’s also the frustration of the Democrats who are angry with the eight Democrats who are voting for this, is they feel that this won’t if it’s not rolled up in the government shutdown, then this will not be something that will be extended. These subsidies.

Archon Fung: Yeah. Yeah. I think you’re definitely right on the vote. And I’m inclined to agree with you on the politics, too, because there will be, I think, lots of opportunities to demonstrate where the Republicans are and where the Democrats are on this question. So covering the news backwards, I thought our news recap was all gonna be about the midterms, but there’s actually been something like three news cycles since then. I don’t know if you’re on the road, so I don’t know if you read this news, but the Times is reporting that President Trump has pardoned seventy-seven people and especially those who were associated with helping him in his efforts to overturn the twenty twenty elections. So, according to The Times, those pardoned include Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and your good friend, Sidney Powell. That was facetious, of course.

Stephen Richer: Definitely followed that one. And as our listeners might have guessed at this point, we’re not having a guest on this time. We’re just going over some of the things that have happened. In particular, we’re going to talk about fusion voting and how that played out in New York City last Tuesday for Tuesday election day. But with respect to the pardoned false electors and the people who were part of that scheme, certainly aware, Arizona was one of the states where charges have been brought against the eleven false electors. Now, those were state charges brought by the state attorney general. So I’m not sure that the president could have hardened those charges anyways if they had turned into convictions. But as it happens, I think our state AG is going to be dropping that case anyways. Really? I didn’t know that. Yeah, for a whole host of reasons, because there was a procedural issue with the grand jury indictment. But then maybe just, I don’t know, maybe the political winds are changing. Maybe this is now so far removed that is it really doing something healthy for society? I don’t know, but it’s certainly something that I’ve followed closely just Given my involvement in the twenty twenty election in Arizona was one of those states that submitted the electors without a clause that said this is in, you know, in case there is a dispute, here is an alternative set of electors. They just submitted it as the legitimate list of electors. And so ultimately, those eleven people were charged. I think one or two took a plea deal and then the other were going to proceed to trial. But that trial doesn’t look like it’s going to happen at this point.

Archon Fung: Oh, interesting. And my understanding is that President Trump definitely cannot pardon people for state crimes. So these these pardons that came out this morning, some people are saying, oh, they’re symbolic or preemptive because there are no federal charges against these particular people. Yeah. And we know that President Trump does and says a lot of things for symbolic reasons. And I think that perhaps this is one of them.

Stephen Richer: Now, I can’t answer why now. Why in November, other than it’s been five years since that election? But I don’t know what’s significant about that. But I think it’s more than anything. I think that this is a signaling, a signaling that if you are with President Trump. even if that gets you in trouble with the law, that he will have your back. And some people have said that President Trump has been famously not loyal or not taking care of the people who would help him out. And certainly Rudy Giuliani is somebody who has been at the president’s side for some time now. And so maybe it’s that signal.

Archon Fung: Right. And so to me, I mean, I find that signal pretty disturbing if the with me part is you’re with me in an effort to overturn a legitimate election. So on the legitimate election issue, do you think that Tuesday’s election results will back us off from kind of the edge of the cliff of, hopefully a small probability of election meltdown. So here’s what I mean. Okay, so the Democrats outperformed expectations in many, many elections on the off-year election on Tuesday, right? They won the governor and AG of Virginia, a governor of New Jersey, mayor of New York City with Zohra Mamdani, and then a big win in Prop. Fifty. The California referendum result was something like sixty four thirty five. And so my thought is one reason whether you’re a Democrat or Republican and you’re in power, one reason why you don’t really push the boundary as hard as you can, including persecuting your political opponents is you think, oh, well, one day I might not be in power and I don’t want them to do that to me. So do you think the the kind of blue spanking on Tuesday will make President Trump and but especially Republican supporters in Congress back off a little bit of the real hardball and say, hey, look, someday I may not be in power and I don’t want them to do this kind of thing to me.

Stephen Richer: No, I don’t think so.

Archon Fung: No, why not? Why not?

Stephen Richer: I just think that increasingly governments govern as if it’s Friday night and there are no consequences on Saturday morning and that you just keep going hard and you enjoy it. And, you know, YOLO, I guess you only live once and don’t think about what might happen in the future. And I think it goes to the long term phenomenon that’s been described in politics of short-term actors in a long-term game where politicians maximize what’s necessary for the next real for the next reelection or for the immediate benefits without sort of any care for the long-term system and I think that’s been like I said true for a while now now what I think that these elections could do well one I’m a little hesitant to read too much into it and I certainly agree with your characterization of the Virginia race and the New Jersey race I don’t know how much the California phenomenon was a D versus R and certainly the mayoral election in New York City was a D versus a D versus an R. Maybe it was the further left D and in some ways Cuomo had come to represent the R position because he had been endorsed by President Trump. But so one, I don’t know how much you can read into it. And then two, I think that potentially it could make people feel a little bit better about the twenty twenty six election and I actually thought this is where you are going to go with it because we’ve heard from many in the elections community that the federal government is mobilizing to disrupt election day and the Atlantic had a very long piece about all the ways in which the federal government might try to disrupt election day and then four or five days before election day the Department of Justice had said that they were going to send monitors, observers, attorneys who would be looking at election processes in a number of counties in California and in New Jersey, and a bunch of people worried that that would manifest in something unusual. And it seems like, with the exception of a few sort of normal election day mishaps and technical errors and normal human mistakes, fallacies and flaws that it was a very successful peaceful uneventful election day in terms of the administration itself yeah and so that’s a huge breather uh for me.

Archon Fung: I don’t know if you you uh know about this but uh for a big part of the cold war there’s this group the bull uh uh The that published a journal called The Bulletin, The Atomic Scientists, and they have a clock and it’s a countdown to midnight. And so they say, OK, how close are we to midnight where midnight is a nuclear war? And so it backs off when we’re a little bit further and gets closer when they think, oh, no, the chance is high. I think maybe on Tuesday we’ve backed off a little bit from that for the reason that you say, look, there wasn’t. uh all of these accusations of voter fraud or anything like that which is terrific uh and then also uh for the election meltdown scenario in i think it requires a too close to or a pretty close election where the margin small number of districts or in those districts a small margin And if it’s an ordinary election in which the incumbent party loses ground in Congress and then Tuesday indicates, well, they may lose bigger than we thought, then maybe that backs the clock off a little bit. But as you say, I don’t know how much to read off Tuesday. It’s a long time between now and Tuesday.

Stephen Richer: But the cues from Republican Party leadership were better than perhaps they have been in past elections. President Trump himself said it was because he was not on the ballot and because of the shutdown that Democrats performed well in last week’s elections. He did not go into mail voting he did not go into illegal immigrants participating in the election now sure some of that existed on the internet but one of the things that surprised me is my good friend carrie lake even said that it was a shame that democrats won this election and a number of people online were saying oh my gosh has she finally acknowledged that the republicans lost an election and and and if you can get carrie lake to admit that then i think you can get uh pretty much anyone Who’s of any prominence within the Republican Party, because she represents certainly the the the outermost flank on that. And so, you know, in some ways that that was a that’s a success. That’s a win. And maybe we’re in a world, especially in election administration, where we we take our wins small and large as we can get them.

Archon Fung: Yeah, well, I would not like nothing more than to turn down the heat on doubt. So yeah, hats off to that.

Stephen Richer: Okay, so can we segue into our topic ahead?

Archon Fung: Yeah, we actually had a deep democracy dive topic today.

Stephen Richer: Because there was one area in which people had some confusion about election administration, and that is with respect to how New York City and the state of New York conducts its mayoral elections as well as a number of other elections and it has what is called fusion voting and because i think you know more about fusion voting in terms of the history and maybe the reason why and the democracy connection i’ll hand it over to you to sort of what what is fusion voting and and i guess what were people saying about it.

Archon Fung: Great, great. So Sarah, I don’t know if you have this graphic up, but could you put up the Elon Musk’s tweet on Tuesday night of the election? Okay, so this is a tweet from Elon Musk and he says, the New York City ballot form is a scam. And let’s like set aside the no ideas required and focus on bullet number two. The other mayoral candidates appear twice in Right. And so this is true. So if I don’t know if you guys can see the graphic there, but you can see that Zoran Mamdani appears twice in box A and box D. And box A is Zoran Mamdani as a Democrat. And then box D is Zoran Mamdani as the candidate of the Working Families Party. And then you can see Curtis Sliwa also appears twice, one as the Republican Party candidate in box B and again in the Protect Animals Party candidate in box E. And then Andrew Cuomo appears in box I only one as the Fight and Deliver Party candidate.

Stephen Richer: So actually, this is like I could see how somebody could be confused by this. And Elon Musk is a longtime California voter. He’s used to seeing, hey, the candidates should be listed once. And then I fill out the oval for the candidate that I want. And, you know, like it’s not that complicated what’s going on here.

Archon Fung: Right. And so why does the New York City ballot look so crazy or unlike New York City or unlike California and many, many other ballots? It’s because right now there are two states in the country that have this provision called fusion balloting or fusion voting. And those two states are New York and Connecticut. And what fusion balloting means is that you could have any number of parties nominate a particular individual. So Stephen, if you were running in New York, the Republican Party could nominate you and the Libertarian Party could nominate you.

Stephen Richer: Yeah, I’d take both of those, but I’d also want the animal one because I found out that he was a really big cats person. He had cats in his home and so he got the- He got the Animal Party nomination as well. I’d take that one as well. Yeah.

Archon Fung: And then you could do the Animal Party and I’d be running against you. And maybe if I were lucky, I’d get the Democratic Party nomination, the Working Families nomination and maybe the Green Party nomination. All right. And then on election day, people would vote for like all six of those parties. And then your vote total would be the number of Republicans plus the number of libertarians plus the number of animal party people. And then my vote total would be the number of Democrats, the number of Green Party people and the number of Working Families Party people. And then we’d we total up those and the one who got the most total votes would win. And that’s called fusion balloting. OK, so for the purposes of last week’s election, that meant that Mamdani received one vote for every vote that was filled in for where he was the Democratic nominee. And he received one vote also for if he was filled in for the, what was it? The Working Families- Working Families Party, right. Yeah, go ahead. What does somebody, it all amounts to the same, why do they have this then? That seems weird.

Archon Fung: Yeah. OK, great. So, Sarah, could you show the my screenshot from the New York City Board of Elections results if you have that? OK, so this is a screenshot from a Web page at the New York City Board of Elections on, I guess, Wednesday morning after 97.98% of the Scantron ballots had been processed. And so this top panel here is the results according to each party. Right. So you can see in the top row, Zoran Mamdani gets forty two percent of the vote for people who voted for him as a Democrat. And then if you look down in row four, he get seven point six four percentage of New Yorkers voted for Zora Mamdani as on the Working Families line. And then Curtis Sliwa, number two, gets six point six three on the Republican line and on line five gets point four eight from the Protect Animals line. So Zoran Mamdani’s total votes are row one plus row four, which is about, you know, fifty point four percent of the vote. And if you look at the working family support, if he only got the working family support, he still would have beat Curtis Sliwa. Sliwa, right, because Sliwa would have gotten about seven point one percent of the vote. So there’s two reasons. Okay, the main reason why people like…

Stephen Richer: One thing, I just got to point out that it’s pretty… Pretty interesting that the Working Families Party received more votes than did the Republican Party in this New York City mayoral, just six point seven point six four to six point six three. And so I would just caution anyone who wants to read too much in the United States as a whole, that there are more people working voting for the working families than there are the Republican Party. Anyhow, sorry for interrupting. So New York is not representative of the rest of the United States for sure in many, many ways. And this is one of them. There actually is a working families party line in New York City, which is like the rest of the United States. OK, so like stepping way, way back, people like me, like fusion balloting primarily as a mechanism to enable third and fourth parties to really compete in elections. Right. And so I’m of the view and I’m of the view that and sixty percent of Americans on surveys agree with this. that there should be more than two functional parties in the United States. And we can go into that in another show, but I think part of the the sickness of American democracy right now is because you’ve got two parties fighting it out and they’re polarized and there’s gridlock and a lot of people have views that don’t get represented. But anyway, I think there should be more than two parties. And fusion for me is a great way to get to more than two parties. And there’s two reasons that fusion might have that effect. One reason is that it allows me, like if I lived in New York and voted in New York, which I do not, it would allow me to vote for third and fourth parties, that is not the Democrats or the Republicans, without wasting my vote, right? Because if I like Zora Mamdani or I like Curtis Sliwa, I can vote in the Protect Animals Party or the Working Families Party without throwing away my vote. Whereas without Fusion, if I voted for the Working Families Party, it would be Some candidate that had no chance of winning. So I would just vote purely expressively. That’s number one. And then number two is if I’m the candidate, if you’re the candidate, Stephen, say, and you win in New York City and like, uh, uh the libertarians and thirty percent comes from the protect animals party then you’ll know kind of where your support is coming from and what those different sectors want and be able to act accordingly and craft a policy agenda according to where your basis of support is on those different views so i think in those two ways fusion is a good measure.

Stephen Richer: So for a voter this is a way to signal where you’re at without having to maybe throw away, as some people say, your vote, such that I can express dissatisfaction with the Republican Party, I can vote for the Libertarian Party, but the Libertarian Party is anchoring itself to the Republican Party candidate, and so I don’t take myself out of the picture by voting for a candidate who in all likelihood would not win. And then for the political parties, it’s a way of maybe issue advocacy of shifting the debate. And here I’m thinking of Ross Perot in what was it? 1992, I believe, where he really forced the Republican Party to address some of the taxation concerns that he had previous to that. It was Pat Buchanan maybe on the. Democratic side, there were some Ralph Nader Green Party where forced the Democratic Party to embrace some of his Green Party ideas. Yeah. But what do you say to somebody who says, well, like, ultimately, those parties still have to anchor themselves to one of the two major political parties if they’re going to win? Yeah,

Archon Fung: I think the candidates have to anchor themselves because, at least for the foreseeable, most of their support would come on the Democrat line or the Republican line. for sure, but allows these third, fourth, maybe fifth parties to develop as, you know, real political organizations with distinctive views, which I think is really, really important right now. I mean, just look at this debate within the Democratic Party. Like, should it be left like Zohra Mamdani or more centrist like like Abigail Spanberger? Uh, that’s a real debate. And one way of kind of working that out in a healthy way would be to have different parties that represented those views and for people to kind of as voters to mix and match.

Stephen Richer: Okay. So this is basically the democratic party just got a free public poll. If it was curious as to where its voters are within New York city, they just understand that the vast majority of our voters are still identifying as just democratic democratic. But a significant percentage are coming at it from this working families party, which may gravitate around certain or revolve around certain issues. And maybe those are issues that we want to address. So for the benefit of people like Elon Musk, who were confused, this has been going on in the United States for some time. In fact, it dates back to the nineteenth century. And in New York City, it goes at least to the middle of the twentieth century. They’ve been doing this since then. Now, as Arkon mentioned at the outset, it’s become less and less common. We can get into some of that, but I’m curious, do you think that this has actually helped some of the debates? Do you think that this does allow, I don’t know what the social science literature says, does it allow for more ideas to get into a healthy ecosystem such that people don’t take up anti-democratic means in order to express themselves?

Archon Fung: Uh, I don’t know the historic, like, I don’t think there’s enough evidence in the contemporary political scene that is to say the last fifty or sixty years, because the only places that have it are New York State and Connecticut. And so, you know, pretty rarefied and not very representative political environments. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, almost every state had fusion balloting, and you had lots and lots of parties. And famously, a lot of cities were run by socialists, kind of sewer socialists, right? They wanted to provide water and public health goods and stuff like that, but still a much wider range of political ideas and policy agendas than is current. And then in the early part of the twentieth century, the major parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, did lots and lots of stuff at the state level to make fusion illegal in most of the country. And I read that largely as a barrier to entries. They didn’t want to have to compete with all of these third and fourth parties. So I don’t know that we can establish empirically to a certainty that it creates a more healthy public conversation. I definitely think it would widen the aperture so that more ideas would be in the mix. That might lead to chaos. I think it would lead to a more healthy kind of democratic dynamic. But really, I guess for me, it’s more of a rights-based issue. So it’s come up before the Supreme Court, and the people who are arguing that fusion should be everywhere as a constitutional matter, one of their main arguments is that it’s about freedom of speech and freedom of association. Right. So if you’re the Libertarian Party and or if I’m the Libertarian Party and you, Stephen, are the candidate, why shouldn’t the electoral system enable me to choose you and you to choose me as a matter of political expression? And then the voters can vote for who they want. Right. And then kind of if you’re a rights person, a freedom of speech person, then the chips fall where they fall. So that’s the democracy hook.

Stephen Richer: And I guess I’ll say from my parting words is it’s just increasingly fascinating to me how something like this, which was probably understood by the vast majority of people voting in New York City because they had either voted before or they had sample ballots or because there was enough advertising and information available in New York City as to explain this process, but just how all of our elections are increasingly nationalized and how The way in which elections are administered being one of the last things in this country that isn’t very nationalized is highly incongruent with the media and with social media and with people commenting on this. And I got to witness this in spades after the twenty twenty election. when people would allege certain things just because two different states had two different set of state laws and didn’t mean that anything was going wrong. It just meant that things were going differently. But people, again, we think of so much in a national environment. So interesting to me, but disappointing in the sense that I wish people would have spent a little time just Googling about fusion ballots and about New York City before sounding off on this. But I suspect that I will be disappointed in the future on many levels.

Archon Fung: But the silver lining is it enables us to have this discussion with everybody who’s watching about fusion voting, which I’m guessing most people don’t. hadn’t heard of before. We thought it was important to bring this to your attention because probably a lot of people who listen to the show have heard of ranked choice voting, which is another kind of ballot reform. And I think the fusion people kind of compete with the ranked choice voting people about how to make our democracy better by restructuring the ballot. So we thought it would be, since New York City is on a lot of people’s minds, we thought it would be a good idea to bring this kind of deeper level of democracy reform to your attention.

Stephen Richer: So we’ll do some more stuff on electoral reform in the future. Archon will sound off on proportional representation and all the thought that he’s given to that. But for now, we’ve hit our thirty minute mark. So I just want to say thank you for tuning in this week. Thank you to all the veterans who have served this country. I hope tomorrow is a wonderful and meaningful day for all of you. And we’ll be back next Tuesday. And if you have any ideas for topics or things that you would like to see us cover, please write in and we will likely have a guest for next Tuesday’s episode as we have most of the time been doing, but Archon and I wanted to get into this, just the two of us.

Archon Fung: Absolutely. And thanks everyone for tuning in. Thanks to our production team, who’s Sarah, Colette, Evelyn, and Courtney. And let me just join Stephen in wishing people a great Veterans Day. And for those of you who’ve served or are serving, thank you very much.