Building On Fusion Voting¶

A Congressional Elections Modernization Act (CEMA) paper in conversation with the fusion voting movement¶

Prepared by Albert Ramos for The American Policy Architecture Institute

The people working to bring fusion voting back have done something difficult and admirable. The Center for Ballot Freedom, Protect Democracy, the Working Families Party, and the litigators and organizers carrying fusion cases through state courts took a reform that was stolen from American voters more than a century ago and made it a live question again. They also have the diagnosis right -- right enough that most of what follows is agreement.

Where the Congressional Elections Modernization Act (CEMA) parts ways with the fusion movement is narrow and technical: not on the goal, and not on the disease, but on which layer of the system to reach into, and with which tool. There is a piece worth adding to the fusion project, and it is offered here as a collaborator's suggestion rather than a critic's verdict.

Where We Agree¶

Begin with the diagnosis, because on the diagnosis there is very little daylight.

The two-party doom loop is real. American voters are sorted into two coalitions that neither fully represents them nor faces meaningful competition in most places. The duopoly is durable not because it earns its position but because the rules protect it. Third parties are not absent because Americans dislike them; they are absent because the winner-take-all, single-member-district system punishes anyone who votes for them. Ballot choice is thin, and it is thin by design. Fusion advocates have said all of this, often more vividly than anyone else in the reform world, and they are correct.

The history is also on their side, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than as a courtesy. Fusion was once universal in the United States. Before the Australian ballot, parties printed their own tickets and cross-nomination required no one's permission. The bans came in the 1880s and 1890s, and they were not enacted to clean up elections -- they were enacted by major parties, Republicans in the North and Democrats in the South, to destroy the coalition threats that Populist, labor, and multiracial fusion tickets posed to their dominance. In the post-Reconstruction South, Republican-Populist fusion had built multiracial coalitions that elected governors and members of Congress, and the suppression of fusion was bound up with the rise of Jim Crow. This is not contested history. It is a genuine democratic wrong, and the fusion movement is right to name it as one.

And fusion works, within the space it is allowed to occupy. It is a real answer to a real problem. Under winner-take-all rules, a minor-party voter has two bad options: stay home from the minor party entirely, or vote sincerely and risk handing the election to the candidate they like least. Fusion creates a third option. A minor party can endorse a major-party candidate on its own ballot line, and its voters can support that candidate while still being counted as the minor party's voters. The party demonstrates measurable strength; the voter is not punished for sincerity; the winning coalition is visible. New York's Working Families Party has used exactly this mechanism to push real policy outcomes. None of that is trivial, and none of it is a strawman. It is fusion doing precisely what it was designed to do.

So the agreement is broad: the disease is correctly diagnosed, the historical injustice is real, and the treatment relieves a genuine symptom. The rest of this paper is about the treatment's reach -- and about a way to extend it.

What Fusion Is Up Against¶

Here is the thing fusion advocates know better than anyone, because they live it: fusion has to operate inside the machine it is trying to fix.

Every good thing fusion does is a response to a pathology of the winner-take-all, single-member-district system. The spoiler problem, the wasted vote, the invisible minor party -- these exist because of how that system counts votes and draws seats. Fusion is a clever way to route around them. But routing around a problem is not the same as removing it, and the difference shows up in two places that matter.

The first is reach. Fusion gives a minor party influence: the ability to signal strength, to negotiate, to be credited for a margin of victory and hope that credit converts into policy. What it cannot give is seats. The endorsed candidate is still a major-party candidate who will caucus with a major party and answer, in the end, to that party. The minor party remains a junior partner asking for consideration. After more than a century of continuous fusion in New York, the minor parties there have not used their leverage to win proportional representation or any other structural change -- not for lack of skill, but because the ceiling is built into the mechanism. Fusion can make a coalition visible. It cannot seat one.

The second is durability, and this is the harder one. Fusion was banned once. It is being fought for, right now, one state and one courtroom at a time, precisely because it lives at the level of state ballot law -- the level most exposed to the parties that benefit from killing it. The fusion movement's central labor is the labor of a reform that can be taken away. Win it in New Jersey, and Michigan is still ahead of you; win it in Michigan, and the next hostile legislature can begin the work of narrowing it again. This is not a criticism of the strategy. It is the strategy the legal terrain forces. But it is worth naming honestly: a reform won at the state-ballot-law layer is a reform that has to be defended there in perpetuity.

This is the right place to draw the lesson that the broader reform world keeps relearning. Reforms that operate inside the old machinery stay vulnerable to the old machinery. Ranked-choice voting has felt this directly -- a handful of unfavorable single-winner outcomes became the raw material for repeal campaigns and a wave of preemptive bans, because RCV, too, was operating one layer up from the structure that produces those outcomes. The pattern is not unique to any one method. It is what happens when a reform is bolted onto a system rather than replacing the part of the system that generates the problem. Fusion's vulnerability to repeal is the same vulnerability, in a different key.

None of this means fusion is wrong. It means fusion is doing the most it can do from where it stands.

The Piece Worth Adding¶

So here is the offer, and it is an offer, not a verdict.

The reason fusion's reach is capped and its gains are reversible is that fusion intervenes at the level of the ballot, inside a system that was built to produce two parties. The Act intervenes one layer down -- at the structure that produces the two-party outcome in the first place -- and it does so using a tool that does not require winning the same fight in fifty states.

That tool is the Elections Clause. Congress has constitutional authority over the time, place, and manner of congressional elections. A reform enacted there is not a state-ballot-law question that each legislature relitigates; it is federal architecture for federal seats. The fusion movement's defining burden -- the state-by-state, courtroom-by-courtroom grind -- is exactly the burden this layer is built to lift. Reach for the right tool, and apply it at the layer where it does the most work.

What CEMA builds at that layer is what fusion advocates have wanted all along, made structural:

Proportional representation turns influence into seats. Beginning at the First CEMA Election, qualifying states elect Representatives from multi-member districts of three to seven seats using Proportional STAR. A party with twenty percent support wins roughly twenty percent of the seats. The minor party that fusion lets you signal support for becomes a minor party you can actually elect. This is the ceiling lifted: not a junior endorser hoping for concessions, but members of Congress who answer to your voters and whose votes are needed to govern. It is the same coalition fusion makes visible -- now seated.

STAR voting retires the spoiler, so the workaround is no longer needed. Voters score every candidate from zero to five; the two highest advance to an automatic runoff decided by majority preference. The sincere vote and the strategic vote become the same vote. The problem fusion exists to route around is removed at its source, which means a minor-party voter no longer needs a ballot-line mechanism to vote their conscience safely -- the counting method already protects them.

Joint Endorsement Lists keep what fusion is actually about. This is the part that matters most to a fusion advocate, so it deserves to be clear: CEMA does not throw away cross-endorsement. It preserves it. Under Title II, each candidate appears once on the ballot, with up to three party endorsements displayed beside their name -- Registered: Democratic | Endorsed by: Democratic, Working Families, Green. Voters see exactly which parties back which candidates. Coalitions stay visible. Minor parties keep their endorsement power and the public credit that comes with it. What changes is only the plumbing underneath: one ballot line instead of several, no vote-aggregation asset that can be traded for patronage, no vote-share threshold that forces a minor party to endorse the major-party nominee just to survive. The informational good fusion delivers is kept; the structural fragility is set down.

Put together, these are not a replacement for what the fusion movement wants. They are a floor underneath it. The coalition you can signal under fusion, you can seat. The conscience vote fusion protects through ballot mechanics, the counting method protects directly. And the endorsement visibility that is the heart of fusion is carried forward intact -- but resting on federal architecture, so it does not have to be won back every cycle in every state.

An Honest Word About Where We Differ¶

It would be easy, and dishonest, to pretend CEMA and fusion are simply complementary with no tension between them. There is a real difference, and naming it is more respectful than papering over it.

The difference is a judgment about where a reformer's finite time and capital do the most good -- and that judgment is shaped by values, experience, and what each of us has lived. Reasonable people who agree completely on the diagnosis land in different places on the cure, and they land there honestly. This paper does not claim a proof that fusion is the wrong choice. It claims that there is a structural option, reachable through the Elections Clause, that delivers what fusion is reaching for without the ceiling and without the perpetual defense. Whether that is worth a reformer's attention is a question each reformer gets to answer for themselves.

What CEMA asks is only this: that the fusion movement's considerable talent and conviction take a look at the layer below the ballot. Not because the fusion work is wrong -- it is not -- but because the goal the fusion movement has carried for years might be more fully and more durably won one layer down, with a different tool, at the level of Congress itself.

Conclusion¶

Fusion voting was unjustly suppressed, its suppression served the powerful rather than the public, and its restoration would make American elections better than they are now. On all of that, CEMA and the fusion movement stand together.

The Act offers a way to take the thing fusion is built to do and give it more reach and a firmer foundation: proportional representation to turn endorsement leverage into actual seats, STAR voting to make the sincere vote safe without any workaround, and Joint Endorsement Lists to carry fusion's coalition-signaling forward without the fragility that comes from living in state ballot law. And because it is built on the Elections Clause and aimed at Congress, it need not be won state by state.

The question is not whether to keep fighting for fusion. It is whether the cause fusion serves might be served more completely by building one layer down. That is a question worth sitting with -- and it is offered here in the spirit of people who are, after all, trying to build the same thing.

Works Cited¶

Argensinger, Peter H. "'A Place on the Ballot': Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws." American Historical Review 85, no. 2 (April 1980): 287-306.

Drutman, Lee. "How Fusion Voting Builds the New Parties That Can Break the Two-Party Doom Loop." Lee Drutman's Newsletter, November 18, 2025.

Morse, Adam, and J.J. Gass. More Choices, More Voices: A Primer on Fusion. Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, October 2006.

Pocasangre, Oscar, and Maresa Strano. "What We Know About Fusion Voting." New America, July 2024.

Ramos, Albert E. Congressional Elections Modernization Act, Rev 6.0. The American Policy Architecture Institute, 2026.

Scarrow, Howard A. "Duverger's Law, Fusion, and the Decline of American 'Third' Parties." Western Political Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1986): 634-647.

Soyer, Daniel. Left in the Center: The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021.

Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, 520 U.S. 351 (1997).

Revision history available in the raw file.

📥 Download this document (opens on GitHub -- click the ⬇ download button)