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

[Dave Ketchum]

Makes me write of an interesting NY law and its history.

In NY you can nominate by petition and, for fusion, the nominee on some of 
the petitions has to be outside the petitioners' party.

BY NY LAW, if candidate is outside party, petition does not count unless 
party leadership approves.
      Since the major parties write the laws, why would they write such a 
law?
      In self defense against a minor party congressman who kept 
embarrassing them in Washington by existing - getting nominated on his own 
AND major party lines and thus reelected without need to work hard at 
campaigning.
      Law FAILED in its purpose when first used - voters in Harlem LIKED 
their congressman and, while some of them liked nominating him on their 
major party lines, his only being on the minor party line did not stop 
them from voting for him.
      Major parties did fusion with another minor party in the next 
election to get a new face in Washington.
      Since then, minor parties do get some value from the law.

"fixes", as used below, is too strong a word - you have to get away from 
Plurality to talk of fixing.
DWK

On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:09:24 -0700 Scott Ritchie wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-09-02 at 18:52 -0700, Brian Olson wrote:
> 
>>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.
> 
> An interesting quirk of fusion voting is that it becomes possible for a
> candidate to obtain the nomination of every party.  While this was rare
> for major elections, it did happen in quite a few cases with local
> elections.  One wonders if more than a few of these candidates weren't
> entirely honest with at least one of the parties nominating them.
> 
> Cheers,
> Scott Ritchie
-- 
  davek at clarityconnect.com    people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
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