State Fusion Issues

On August 11, two ballot-qualified parties in Oregon filed a lawsuit in state court, alleging that the actual text of the Oregon election law does permit two parties to jointly nominate the same candidate. The plaintiffs include the Working Families Party and the Independent Party. The WFP wants to cross-endorse Peter Buckley, a Democratic nominee for the state house. The Independent Party wants to cross-endorse Joel Haugen, a Republican nominee for U.S. House, First District.

"In Oregon there is a distinction between “endorse” (a term with no legal significance) and “nomination” by a political party. Nomination has legal significance and gives both the candidate and the party certain rights under statute, all in furtherance of the great cognate rights of expression and assembly.

The IPO has nominated state and local candidates, and cross-nominated Jeff Merkley, D challenger to Sen. Gordon Smith, and the D candidate for State Treasurer, in addition to the R candidate in the 1st CD. Working Families cross-nominated an Oregon House candidate. All the candidates have formally accepted each of the major and minor party nominations.

OR law regulating the design of ballots requires that a candidate’s name may appear only once on the ballot, and then sets out a series of “rules” for which party name(s) shall appear with the candidate on the ballot. The Secretary of State contends that in cross-nominations, only the name of the major party may appear, without exception. We disagree.

Thus, this is not a case about “fusion” voting in the sense of allocating a separate ballot line to each nominating party, but a claim that the law requires that the names of both nominating parties appear with the candidate’s name. This is fusion-lite, or whatever, but would nevertheless provide truthful, accurate information about the candidate and the official actions of the minor parties."

On August 12, the South Carolina Secretary of State, and the South Carolina Election Commission, jointly agreed that if two different parties jointly nominate the same presidential candidate and the same slate of presidential elector candidates, that the state will add the votes together (from both parties) to determine the candidate’s vote total.

This may seem as though it should have been obvious all along. The other fusion states certainly considered it obvious, but South Carolina had been equivocating this year, about that point.

Michael H. Drucker
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