ballot fusion

Legislative implications of current anti-party reforms

Following up on yesterday’s post, here is a brief statement of the legislative reason for the repeal of the single transferable vote in US history. I have no reason think it would not apply to instant runoff as well. Both are fundamentally STV, and both are being promoted as a way to break up parties.

I have written elsewhere that STV opened the possibility of ‘vote leakage.’ Leakage usually refers to votes cast for one party but that help a different one win seats, via the transfer process.

Connecting this phenomenon to STV repeal required tracking leakage between coalitions, not among parties. New York City illustrates the logic. There, votes were expected to leak among a series of anti-Tammany parties.

Apportionment diagram of New York City’s first STV-elected council, November 1937. Source: LSE USAPP, December 2016.

In other cases, local parties were formed to keep votes away from the rumps of parties displaced by the reforms. This was a direct response to problems organizing STV-elected legislatures.

Slate mailer from Worcester, Mass., early 1950s. Source: author’s archival research.

It didn’t work in the long run. Below is my go-to image for introducing people to the problem. It gives the percentage of roll-call votes in each legislative term on which some portion of said local party (Citizens’ Plan E Association or CEA in this case) teamed up with the opposition and thus defeated its own party’s position. This is known as a majority roll when we focus on the majority coalition, which the figure does. The link between the roll rate and STV repeal is clear. Chapter 7 here gives a detailed account of this and other such episodes, linking them to vote leakage as well.

Source: chapter 7 of *More Parties or No Parties*.

Here’s why this is an issue for advocates. Let’s say the point of current reforms is to bring Republican moderates into coalition with Democrats. That would be analogous to the reason for the CEA above. What the graph shows is the reform failing to bind that coalition. It shows the reform eventually doing the opposite of what it was supposed to do.

This is one reason why I recommended party-list systems and maybe ‘fusion voting’ instead of STV and its derivatives. (Others have been equity and ease of implementation.)

My current thoughts on PR/“more parties” reforms

What follows is mainly for me, but maybe it is useful.

I would view list-PR adoption as an ‘insulating’ action by a coalition that is hard but not impossible to put together. The same would go for national/widespread imposition of ballot fusion (also see first link).

I am wary of efforts to promote PR for its own sake.

I think we are going to see (or at least hear about) more reform activity than usual in cities and maybe some states. It would be nice to see this go in the “more parties” direction.

I prefer to say “pro-party.” I don’t think that direction has to alter the party system by, say, causing lots of parties to win seats in Congress or run presidential candidates.

Even locally, I am reluctant to say it would be easy to build a pro-party reform coalition.

Cross-endorsement fusion is better than instant runoff (and approval)

I spent a chunk of Memorial Day weekend writing up some thoughts on fusion. They apparently are part of this case (which does not affect my views). Here is the opening paragraph:

I have been asked to share some thoughts on political parties, democratic stability, and the relationship of each to ballot fusion (understood here to mean cross-endorsement). What follows is based on my doctoral education and ongoing research into so-called ‘multiparty reforms.’ A key theme will be that the number of parties matters less than whether the electoral rules facilitate coalition, then make such coalitions unambiguously known to voters. Cross-endorsement fusion has desirable properties on both fronts: promoting coalition, then telling voters on the ballot what coalition they aim to place in control of government.

The ideas in the ‘expert report’ are based partly on material from an early draft of my book, but which I decided to save for stand-alone publication.

That part of the book deals with “making reform work,” especially against the joint backdrop of presidentialism and the Electoral College. I might as well share the language now.

No consideration of multiparty American democracy is complete without attention to the presidential system of government. There are two big problems: the Electoral College unit rule, then the so-called separation of powers. I will suggest ballot fusion as a way to deal with both. The reason is that it promotes more efficient bargaining than the leading alternatives, namely, ranked-choice voting and runoffs.

In the American system of presidential elections, a third-party candidacy poses two big threats. One is that the trailing candidate may win the election — not only because the system advantages low-population states, but also due to spoilers in electorally pivotal states. Another is that there may not be a majority in the Electoral College, throwing the decision to the House of Representatives (where each state delegation votes in block). The strongest institutional explanation for our two-party system is the “unit rule” allocation of a state’s electors to the popular-vote winner in said state. This system solidified in 1836, not accidentally alongside the two-party system itself (E. J. Engstrom 2004). Had we become democratic in the era of multiparty democracy, it is likely we would use some other method to elect the President. Clearly, if we are to have majority rule and multiparty government, there needs to be some new mechanism for presidential elections.

With either problem, the issue is to promote bargaining, leading to some coalition with majority support. One possible option is electoral fusion. Under fusion, two or more parties nominate a single candidate, and voters may support that candidate on as many ballot lines as there are nominating parties.

Fusion is not the same cross-filing, which allows the candidate to choose which party labels appear near their name (Masket 2009) […]

Fans of other systems (e.g., runoffs, single-seat RCV) may counter that their preferred remedies achieve the same result. […] One thing is certain, however. Under fusion, the incentive is for two or more parties to agree on just one candidate. They do not compete for votes: first-choice, second-choice, or otherwise. Rather, they pool effort behind victory for the coalition. Evidence also suggests that fusion increases voter turnout, mainly by mobilizing voters who do not turn out for either major party (Michelson and Susin 2004; Kantack 2017). For more information on fusion, including its history in American elections, see a comprehensive book by Lisa Disch (2002).

At this point, some may note that no proposal deals with the Senate. Even if we can design a system for multiparty coalition within the separation of powers, the Senate still entrenches a minority veto. Further, the critical determinant of this veto — an equal number of Senators per state, regardless of population — cannot be removed from the Constitution.

My expert report only deals indirectly with the presidentialism issues above.