N.J. Supreme Court won’t hear fusion voting case

An effort to bring about fusion voting in New Jersey via court action appears to be officially dead.

Proponents of fusion voting, which allows candidates to run under multiple party designations on general election ballots (and which is expressly forbidden in state law), said yesterday afternoon that the New Jersey Supreme Court had declined to hear their case after an appellate court ruled against them earlier this year.

“We continue to believe that voters have the constitutional right to vote for the candidates of their choice on the party lines that best reflect their values, candidates have the right to run on the ballot lines of their choice, and political parties have the right to nominate the candidates of their choice,” Richard Wolfe, one of the pro-fusion voting movement’s leaders, said in a statement. “The deprivation of these rights threatens our democracy and discourages voter participation.”

The fusion voting battle dates back to the 2022 midterm elections, when then-Rep. Tom Malinowski attempted to run as both a Democrat and the nominee of the newly created “Moderate Party.” Secretary of State Tahesha Way, obeying 1922 state law dictating that candidates can run under only one party affiliation, turned him down multiple times.

Malinowski went on to lose re-election that November, but the legal battle over fusion voting continued in the years that followed, and in fact began to pick up prominent supporters like former Govs. Jon Corzine and Christine Todd Whitman. Fusion voting is allowed in a handful of other states, most notably New York, which has a fairly robust network of third parties in part because they can cross-endorse nominees from the two major parties.

Since the state law is explicit in its prohibitions on fusion voting, the Moderate Party pursued another tactic: arguing that the law itself violated the state constitution’s protections of voting rights and freedom of speech.

In a February ruling, a panel of state appellate court judges disagreed, finding that nothing in the state’s fusion voting ban contravened the state constitution. If the Moderate Party wanted to lobby legislators to change the law, the judges wrote, they were free to do so, but as it stands now the law is settled.

“New Jersey’s anti-fusion statutes were in existence when the 1947 Convention took place,” the judges wrote. “The delegates to the 1947 Convention were clearly aware of those statutes because they considered but rejected three proposals that would have allowed fusion ballots.”

The Moderate Party tried to appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court, but were officially turned down yesterday. In its press release, the party mentioned no further plans to pursue legal options in New Jersey, instead emphasizing that other fusion voting efforts remain underway in Kansas and Wisconsin.