Because in elections today, third parties can be a problem. At best, they encourage votes for candidates who can't win. At worst, they act as "spoilers," with votes cast for them having the opposite of their intended effect. And because they have little impact on the real world of policy-making, they leave some of our most active, committed citizens effectively shut out of the political process.

This wasn't always the case. For much of our country's history, minor parties played a vital role engaging voters and bringing new ideas into the political mainstream. Parties like the Free-Soilers, Greenback, Prohibition and, most famously, Populists ran candidates in thousands of elections, in coalition with one of the major parties, and so avoided the "wasted vote" problem that makes third parties marginal today. They invigorated our democracy by bringing ideas like abolition, the eight hour day, and even temperance into the public discussion.

They were able to do this because the voting rules in most states used to be different. The electoral system we used for the first 135 years in this country is called different things by different historians – cross-endorsement, multiple party nomination, plural nomination, ballot freedom – but it all means the same thing. We call it fusion voting, and we believe it is time to revive it.

Fusion Voting: The Mechanics

Fusion voting has just one difference from current election rules: Different parties can nominate the same candidate, yet keep their own place on the ballot. That may sound small, but it has a big impact. By giving third parties the "ballot freedom" to support major-party candidates or run their own, it solves the spoiler and wasted vote problems. And by creating a more informative ballot, it leads to better-educated voters and more accountable, issue-oriented politics.

With fusion voting, voters have the option of voting for their preferred candidates on the line of any party that has endorsed them. Votes for each party are tallied separately, but added together to determine the winner. When voters see that several parties have endorsed a candidate, they have more information about where that candidate stands. And when candidates win with third-party votes, they have a better sense of what voters want.

Here's how it can work:

	Candidate/Ballot Line		Percent of Vote
	John Smith, Major Party 1		48%
	Matt Jones, Major Party 2		49%
	John Smith, Good Jobs Party		3%

The votes are added together, and John Smith wins with 51% of the vote.