Libertarian Party of Michigan, Other Third Parties Join to Fight for Fusion Voting

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This article is reprinted from M-Live.com and describes the Libertarian Party of Michigan’s involvement in a fight to bring back “fusion voting.”

Michigan Third Parties Sue to Bring Back a Voting Practice Banned 131 Years Ago
by Matthew Miller, M-Live.com

Michigan’s small political parties – the Greenbackers, Whigs, Libertyites, Free Soilers, Industrials, Know-Nothings, Patrons of Industry – were once able to share nominees with other parties.

In the decades after the Civil War, the practice, known as “fusion voting,” occasionally allowed Democrats to overcome Republican political dominance and gave smaller parties the sort of political relevance they were unlikely to achieve on their own.

Democrat Josiah Begole, a founder of the Flint Wagon Works and early activist for women’s suffrage, won the governorship in 1882 being nominated by both the Democratic Party and the Greenback Labor Party in an election otherwise dominated by Republicans.

An overwhelmingly Republican state legislature outlawed the practice in 1895.

The Michigan Common Sense Party and the Libertarian Party of Michigan are now suing to bring it back, arguing in a lawsuit filed last week in the Michigan Court of Claims that the 131-year-old ban “affords an unfair advantage to the two major parties over new and minor party rivals” and “deprives voters of the opportunity to join together in new and minor parties to advance positions that are unrepresented by the major parties.”

Fusion voting allows more than one party to nominate the same candidate for office. What that means for third parties is that, rather than running their own candidates for offices they’re unlikely to win, they’re able to negotiate nominations with Democratic or Republican candidates and, potentially, to influence those candidate’s platforms.

It is currently only legal in New York and Connecticut, though a lawsuit in Wisconsin is seeking to overturn the fusion voting ban there.


“We think that this can be very helpful in this particular time because of the polarization and kind of extremism we’re seeing take root in our politics writ large,” said Jeff Timmer, a former Republican and now a member of the Common Sense Party.

The Michigan Common Sense Party was formed by a group of former Republican officials and office holders concerned about “the mutation of the Republican Party from a stable center-right faction tethered to the rule of law and constitutional boundaries to what it is today, which is not that,” he said.
Attempting to overturn the state’s fusion voting ban was part of the plan from the start, he added.

The lawsuit names Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Michigan Bureau of Elections Director Jonathan Brater as defendants.
Danny Wimmer, press secretary for Attorney General Dana Nessel, said her office will “represent the Secretary and Director of Elections in this matter, in defense of state election law, as we are obligated to do in such matters.”

The lawsuit involves several of Michigan’s long-time political operatives.


The attorneys representing the plaintiffs include Mark Brewer, the onetime head of the state Democratic Party and the attorney for Jocelyn Benson’s gubernatorial campaign; Bob LaGrant, former general counsel for the Michigan Chamber of Commerce; and Samuel Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor.

Backers beleive that fusion voting can give third parties an option besides being spoilers for the candidacies of the most closely aligned major party candidates.
Donna Gundle-Krieg, secretary of the Libertarian Party of Michigan, doesn’t see the party choosing to cross-nominate major party candidates all that often. “Limited government is where we have the most in common with Republicans, but they’re not really much about that these days,” she said.

Still, she could see the party endorsing a Republican like former Congressman Justin Amash. “The beauty of the proposal is we have the option,” she said.
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