Elon v. Hannah: You Make The Call
The text messages started mid-morning on Election Day.
“Hey. Fusion is having a moment online.”
“The online right is discovering today that the election is rigged because Mamdani shows up twice.”
It turns out that the world’s richest man had decided that fusion voting is a scam. I’m not kidding. Sometime Tuesday morning, Elon Musk found a picture of an NYC ballot and, after careful and judicious research, tweeted this to his more than 220 million followers:
Then, he followed up by sharing this tweet from a Heritage Foundation economist;
Musk got more excited, I suppose, and tweeted a third time:
Together, Musk’s three posts garnered some 62 million views. That’s not a typo.
Of course, as every child in New York knows, there’s nothing scam-like here at all, just the normal functioning of the Empire State’s fusion voting system.
It was heartening to see responses pile up from people who know better:
Isaac Saul, who publishes the crosspartisan Tangle News, perhaps said it best. He replied to Musk:
“Nonsense. 1. NYC doesn’t have voter ID laws. 2. In New York, the state, multiple parties can endorse the same candidate, so some can appear multiple times. Sliwa, the Republican, is also listed twice! 3. Eric Adams is on the ballot because he dropped out too late 4. Cuomo lost the primary, and ran as an indy, and ballots list major party candidates first Maybe you don’t like the rules. Fine. But posting this stuff on X with zero context makes people think there is fraud or cheating. These are just the rules being applied to candidates evenly.”
Josh Marshall, the founder and editor of Talking Points Memo, was less polite. He told Musk: “I want to thank you for providing more evidence what a complete fucking moron you are. People appear on the line of multiple parties. people who aren’t the nominee of any party appear lower. seriously, you’re the biggest example of thinking you know everything because yr super rich.”
Doran Schrantz, one of the country’s most respected organizers (she’s based in Minnesota so substantially more polite than Marshall) said: “It’s called fusion voting. You only vote once… but you can vote for a candidate on a [second] party line. So, I could vote Mamdani as a Democrat or Mamdani as a WFP member. It’s a way to have a multi-party voice without falling into the “spoiler” trap of a third party.”
Bhaskar Sunkara, the publisher of The Nation, took the high road and replied to Musk: “Learn how fusion voting works in our state. It’s a more democratic system than in many other parts of the country.”
Musk has such a big megaphone that his misinformed posts generated a jump in interest in fusion voting, as evidenced by this Google Trends search chart.
With enemies like these, who needs friends?
Some big media organizations ran detailed stories rebutting Musk’s mishegas and explaining how fusion voting actually works.
The Associated Press: “FACT FOCUS: New York City ballots do not show proof of ballot fraud.”
Yahoo News posted: “Fusion Or Confusion? Elon Musk Slams NYC’s “Scam” Ballot That Hides Cuomo, Boosts Mamdani Twice.”
The controversy even made it to India, where an outlet based in New Delhi ran a debunker too. (Apparently this year’s NYC election was of great interest to Indians.)
And the good folks at Politifact, one of the premier fact-checking sites on the web, came through with flying colors. They calmly reviewed and then rated Musk’s claim as FALSE. But along the way they provided a helpful explanation for why people might vote on a minor party line which included a quote from your faithful fusion correspondent. Politifact’s Louis Jacobson wrote:
So why would voters support a prominent candidate on a minor-party line?
They might want to send a message about the importance of that party’s positions. They also might want to ensure that the smaller party continues to win enough votes to secure a ballot spot in future elections.
By allowing cross-party alliances, a fusion system allows smaller parties to be more than just a “wasted vote” or a self-defeating “spoiler,” said Dan Cantor, who co-founded the Working Families Party and now heads the Center for Ballot Freedom, which supports fusion voting.
“It allows voters the ability to vote their values and send a message to the candidate that he or she should be attentive to the minor party’s concerns,” Cantor said.
Politifact also highlighted the recent report of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Democracy, noting how historically cross-nominations “were used to elevate issues including the abolition of slavery and enhanced political representation into the mainstream.”
Anyway, Elon may have 220 million followers, but we have an influencer named Hannah. Check out her explanation on TikTok.
It’s not even close.
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What We’re Reading
Deborah Apau and Jennifer Dresden of Protect Democracy have written a banger of a study titled, “Fusion as a Pathway to Proportional Representation: Lessons from global experience and American electoral heritage.”
Lee Drutman weighed in on the ongoing debate between the Democratic Party’s two major wings – Mods and Progs – about the way forward in his essential Undercurrents Substack. One can only hope that the protagonists in this intra-party battle take the time to really grapple with what he calls “the collapse of dimensionality.” In classic Drutman style, it’s both serious and accessible.
What We’re Attending
This November 14 conference at the University of Wisconsin Law School on “Parties, Power, and Possibility: Revisiting Fusion Voting in Wisconsin.” Check out the agenda!
Why is this newsletter called The Ticket? The name comes from the phrase “vote the ticket,” which is what political parties urged their supporters to do in the 1800s, when fusion was legal and widely practiced (see here if you don’t know how fusion voting works). Parties printed their own ballots or published them in newspapers that they were aligned with. Then they exhorted their supporters to “vote the ticket” by dropping that ballot or page from the newspaper into the ballot box on Election Day. All such ballots were legitimate, and “fusion” coalitions between major and minor parties were commonplace from Abolition to the turn of the 20th century. But Jim Crow Democrats (in the South) and Gilded Age Republicans (in the North and West) eventually tired of the challenge and disruption that third parties represented, and in state after state fusion voting was outlawed (and coalitions between parties disappeared). But what was banned can be unbanned.