A South Carolina bill to ban fusion (the ability of two parties to jointly nominate the same candidate) has been introduced. It is H 3067. The sponsors are six Republican legislators, including Majority Leader Kenneth Bingham and Whip Jim Merrill. Republicans have a majority in both houses of the South Carolina legislature. The other sponsors are Representatives Alan Clemmons, Joan Brady, Michael Pitts, and Bill Wylie.
Bills to abolish fusion in South Carolina have made some headway in the past, but have never passed all the way through the legislature.
again, require equal protection by having total fused-font appearing on the ballot of equal total font size — will cure these phony “party” — and the truly independent (non-fused) nominating party such as the Green Party (at least in NYS) would have the largest font on the ballot — no matter the unequal placement of independent bodies such as the Greens at the bottom of the ballot.
SC is my home state, and I swear the Republicans’ sole purpose there is just to try and fuck us over as much as possible.
Jason, I too live in SC, and you speak the truth.
And I wonder why it even matters to the Republicans, as things have been gerrymandered so
badly (to GOP advantage) that there is almost no such thing as a competitive district in SC. Of the 124 state House districts, only 34 featured a November 2008 choice between a Republican nominee and a Democratic nominee. In three others, one major party candidate faced a third-party challenger, and the challengers did pretty well in all three: a Constitution Party nominee got 18.5 percent in one, a Libertarian got nearly 10 percent in another, and a Green Party nominee got over 9 percent in a third.
Only TWO of 124 districts changed party hands–both going from Republican to Democratic. And here’s the thing: one of those was District 115, where Green Party nominee Eugene Platt was taken off the ballot because the Election Commission claimed he was a sore loser, since he lost his bid to win the Democratic primary. He was NOT a sore loser, but a nominee of one ballot-certified party who then tried unsuccessfully to win the nomination of another ballot-certified party. The Democrat won the seat–and I have to say, she is a much better person to represent the district than the Republican incumbent was–with about 50.5 percent of the vote.
The lesson of this seems to be that if no fusion
possibility had been available (such as what these Republicans want to bring about with their bill to ban fusion), Platt might have run as a Green and siphoned enough votes away from the Democratic challenger that the Republican incumbent might have been reelected.
But then nobody ever accused SC Republican legislators of being the brightest bulbs in the pack.
Oops. I just read through what I wrote above, and
those Repubs. may be craftier than I had imagined.