BlueOregon, one of Oregon’s best-known political webpages, has this article (and lively discussion by commenters) on SB 326, which recently passed the Oregon legislature. The bill eliminates the 2005 law that prevents primary voters from signing an independent candidate’s petition, and the bill also legalizes fusion. Most of the comments are about the fusion half of the bill.

“Fusion”, in this writer’s experience, has always been defined as permitting two (or more) parties to jointly nominate the same candidate, and having both party labels on the ballot. Whether the state permits the voter to choose which party label to vote for, or not, is irrelevant to the traditional definition of “Fusion”.

For example, in 1896, both the Democratic Party and the People’s Party nominated William Jennings Bryan for president. Although the People’s Party was ballot-qualified in all states in 1896, only a minority of states let voters choose which party label to vote under. That’s why the People’s Party is only credited with 154,570 popular votes for president in 1896, even though the People’s Party elected 31 presidential electors.

Historians say that the Bryan 1896 candidacy was a “fusion” candidacy, and they don’t discount that statement just because voters in most states couldn’t vote separately either for the Democratic Party or the People’s Party.

States that have fusion in certain circumstances nowadays, but which don’t give the voters a choice of which party label to support, include Vermont, Massachusetts, California, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. Oregon will be joining those states if Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski signs SB 326.

However, nowadays, some people argue that “fusion” means not only the ability of two parties to jointly nominate the same candidate, but that it also necessarily means that the voter must have a choice of party label. So, some people refer to the Oregon-style fusion as “fusion-lite”. The Working Families Party uses the terms “aggregated fusion” for the Oregon-style system, and “disaggregated fusion” for the New York-style of fusion.