[EM] A horrible thing we need to crush: Fusion Voting

[Brian Olson]

Here's a couple links that talk about this terrible "solution" to the 
spoiler problem:
http://www.nmef.org/solution.htm
http://www.blueoregon.com/2006/07/new_party_pushe.html

Ok, yeah, no journalistic integrity, I'm pre-biasing you all against this 
stuff, oh well.

The short short version:
"Fusion Voting" fixes the spoiler problem by allowing 3rd parties to 
nominate one of the candidates of the two major parties.

There's some group called the "Working Families Party" < 
http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/ > who seems to have this electoral 
deform as their primary issue.

They seem to think that the 2000 US President ballot might have looked 
something like this:
__ Bush, Republican Party
__ Gore, Democratic Party
__ Bush, Libertarian Party
__ Gore, Green Party
__ Bush, Total World Domination Party
__ Gore, Working Families Party

A) Great way to continue to ensure the irrelevance of 3rd parties.
B) Yeah, right, like the Greens/Libertarians would ever go along with 
this.
C) No improvement in choice. Still only 2 choices on the ballot. (Though 
some see this as an improvement since then there won't be spoiled 
elections.)

Ideally this will just fade away and never catch on, but it's something to 
watch out for. I ran across the first reference to it I've seen today 
while reading my church's national magazine. I'm sure the author was well 
meaning, and I'll now write them a nice letter about how election reform 
ought to be, with more than two choices and with rankings or ratings 
ballots and all that.


Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/