Patrick T Shepherd

“The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.” -Julius Nyerere.

New York State has been a laboratory of liberal attempts to math their way around inherent flaws and shortcomings in the two-party system. This was dramatically expressed in New York City’s last mayoral elections, which introduced a ranked-choice system. These experiments come up short in addressing the flaws of the two-party monopoly. On that state level, we have another confusing system that allows voters to cast a vote of defiance against the two-party system- Fusion Voting. 

Fusion voting is a system by which candidates can be listed on multiple party ballot lines on the same ballot. In order to get access to a party ballot line in New York, parties must gather 45,000 petitions from voters for a gubernatorial candidate to get them on the ballot. Once the candidate is on the ballot, they must attract at least 2% or 150,000 votes (whichever is greater) to secure a spot on the ballot for the next cycle. Once a party has ballot access, they must continue to meet this threshold in governor races each year. Parties are basically free to determine who occupies each space on their party column by their own internal process- either via a primary or just straight-up selection by party leaders. Notably, these thresholds were all raised in 2020 in a failed attempt by Andrew Cuomo to destroy the Working Families Party for their support of his doomed opponent, Cynthia Nixon, in 2018. 

The effort to destroy 3rd party ballot access in 2020 cleared the field of a handful of fringe and silly parties- including the useless Green Party and Libertarian Party. Two parties survived the purge- the Working Families Party and the Conservative Party. The WFP was founded in 1998 by a collection of community organizations, refugees from the failed New Party, and just about the entire field of powerful unions in New York- including CWA, UAW, SEIU, RWDSU, and others. Some of these unions left after the WFP endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016, simultaneously showing the limitations of this kind of formation and shifting the balance of powers in the organization toward community groups (which would ultimately result in the 2020 Warren endorsement). 

Despite its shortcomings, the WFP remains the only viable alternative to voting for the democratic party in New York State elections. The existence of fusion voting eliminates the spoiler dilemma that afflicts the Green Party Strategy- that voting for an unwinnable 3rd party candidate effectively removes votes for a viable democrat and amounts to a vote for a Republican. With the WFP, there is a vehicle to avoid voting for the democratic party while avoiding the spoiler effect. The WFP vote total can easily be read as a measure of independent progressive and left power in the state- meaning that a higher vote total will push the entire field and policy proposals left to court a demonstrably further left electorate- this result is quantifiably better than any other of the limited choices in a given election: 

• vote democrat, 
• vote unwinnable 3rd party, which isn’t meaningfully building power, 
• Write in a wacky choice like Marx, which will not add to a measurable expression of discontent
• Abstain from voting and waste a potential opportunity to express the preferences of the left vote base.

The most essential component of choosing how to express leftist politics in bourgeois elections is the understanding that the vote itself is best seen as a single token of political power that should be spent in such a way as to most intelligently build our left political project. The vote is NOT a meaningful expression of an individual’s beliefs or moral convictions. Voting is NOT a way by which we can express ourselves- it is a single piece of currency that we may spend in a capitalist political economy that is thoroughly regulated, restricted, corralled, and mediated by capitalist political power. This perspective can result in counter-intuitive strategic voting scenarios, but this is also the task of organizing. Organizing is the act of motivating people to do things that they otherwise would not- in this case, our job is to organize to build and express collective power- not to use our vote in a way that best represents us as individuals.