Dem
51
GOP
49
If every person who voted for Jill Stein in 2016 had voted for Hillary Clinton instead, Clinton would have become president. We doubt that many of them preferred Donald Trump to Clinton and we doubt that any of them expected Stein to be elected president. But third-party candidates sometimes lead to undesirable results. Are there ways to fix the system?
One way that is gradually becoming more common is ranked-choice voting. There you can vote for a fringe candidate and when the fringe candidate is eliminated, your second choice can be for one of the major-party candidates. In this way, you get to make your point without throwing the election to a candidate you hate.
But there is another system change to achieve the same goal that might be more acceptable to some people: fusion voting. In a few states, it is legal for multiple parties to nominate the same candidate. In New York, the Working Families Party almost always nominates the Democrat and the Conservative Party almost always nominates the Republican. The votes that a candidate gets on multiple lines are added up, so a vote for Joe Biden as the Working Families candidate counted exactly the same as a vote for him as a Democrat. By allowing small parties who get on ballot to nominate a major-party candidate, voters who want to make a point of being to the left of the Democrat or to the right of the Republican can easily do so without endangering the major-party candidate. For example, Joe Biden got 386,613 votes in New York on the Working Families ticket. That was 7% of his total vote. Donald Trump got 296,335 votes on the Conservative Party line, or 9% of his total. The Libertarian Party got 60,383 votes, the Green Party got 32,832 votes, and the Independence Party got 22,656 votes, but they all had their own candidates. Fusing works better.
Fusion voting was common until about 1900, when the major parties got together to ban it. If the No Labels group were to invest its $70 million in trying to re-legalize fusion voting in many states, it could advance its stated goals of reducing extremism and making politics work again. Instead it is likely to sow chaos and may end up electing the most extreme candidate. (V)