South Carolina permits two or more parties to jointly nominate the same candidate for any particular office, including president. Many times in the past, presidential candidates (and their slates of presidential electors) have been the nominees of two South Carolina parties. However, in none of the past instances has the presidential election in South Carolina been so close that the use of fusion affected the outcome.
This year, the South Carolina Working Families Party, and the United Citizens Party, both want to cross-endorse the Democratic Party’s slate of electors, so that Barack Obama would be listed as the nominee of all three parties (with voter choice as to which party label to vote for). But the South Carolina Elections Commission refuses to say whether, if this happened, the votes on all three tickets would be added together.
On June 19, the South Carolina Elections Commission said it will not decide this matter. Instead, it said the Secretary of State will need to decide. The excuse for putting the responsibility on the Secretary of State is that the Secretary of State handles paperwork involving presidential electors. The South Carolina Elections Commission is non-partisan, but the Secretary of State, Mark Hammond, is an elected Republican. It seems only common sense that if a candidate for any office is listed on the ballot twice, under two party labels, that the vote for him or her under each label should be added together.
Instances in the past when two different parties in South Carolina jointly nominated the same candidates for presidential elector include 1940, 1972, and perhaps 1928, 1932, 1936, and 1996.
What’s the point of allowing fusion if you don’t add the votes together? That’s the whole point. If, say, 51% of the voters in South Carolina cast their votes for the same, identical slates of presidential electors – regardless of what party label under which they’re listed on the ballot – then those electors should be the ones who trip on down to ye olde Electoral College in December. If the Republican Secretary of State doesn’t like it, he should be lobbying the state legislature to change the law, as Republicans continually urge Democrats to do, instead of taking it upon himself, possibly, to thwart the will of a majority of the electorate.
It wouldn’t make sense any other way. If the slate of electors is the exact same slate, it doesn’t matter how I vote for them, just that I did. The electors for the Democrats are no different than the electors for the WFP. I’d love to see someone try to argue otherwise with anything approaching a straight face.
Any ruling to the contrary would be an incredibly cynical ploy to help the Republicans.
That decision that said there was no right to fusion isn’t going to help this guy pull a fast one, is it?
No, because South Carolina election law plainly does permit fusion. The US Supreme Court decision of 1997 merely said that if a state wants to ban fusion, it may do so.
I can see a legal reason for not aggregating presidential vote totals from different parties but allowing aggregation for other offices.
In presidential elections you are voting for a slate of individual electors not for the person to whom the electors are supposedly pledged.
Are the list of electors identical for all three parties?