New Dog, Old Trick

The new mayor of New York City and Abraham Lincoln have something remarkable in common. Zohran Mamdani was just elected in one of the few places in the country that still allows a once-common practice called fusion voting, a practice that made Lincoln’s presidency possible.

Now largely forgotten outside of New York and Connecticut, fusion figures prominently in American history, having played a pivotal role at a most crucial hour by giving democracy a much-needed boost when preserving the union was at stake.

Fusion voting’s not complicated; it simply allows candidates for office to appear on the ballot as the nominees of multiple parties. The number of votes they receive on different party lines are added together—or fused—to arrive at the final tally.

Fusion voting was once used in every state in the nation including Wisconsin. It’s now widely banned. When it was allowed, fusion voting created political competition, so much that 171 years ago abolitionists were able to use it to put a m…