JULY 17, 2009:NWLP
7/14/09
10:27 AM
Page 6
Working Family Party gets bill to start ‘fusion’ voting
SALEM — The Oregon Working
Families Party is ready to get more ac-
tive in electoral politics next year,
thanks to an election reform that took
three years to pass.
Oregonlive.com reported July 9 that
Gov. Ted Kulongoski intends to sign
Senate Bill 326, which will restore a
kind of “fusion” voting to Oregon. Un-
der fusion voting, candidates can be
nominated by more than one political
party. It’s a practice that opens up the
two-party-dominated political system
and makes minor parties like the union-
backed Oregon Working Families Party
more competitive.
Oregon Working Families Party co-
chair Barbara Dudley told the Labor
Press SB 326 isn’t all they’d hoped for,
but it’s enough that the party can get ac-
tive nominating candidates for the No-
vember 2010 elections.
Full fusion, which the Oregon Work-
ing Families Party lobbied hard for in
the 2007 session of the Legislature,
would give minor parties the option of
using their own ballot line to cross-
nominate a candidate. In a hypothetical
example, voters completing a ballot
might fill in the circle for candidate
Rick Metsger where his name appeared
as a nominee of the Democratic Party,
or where it appeared a second time as
nominee of the Oregon Working Fami-
lies Party. When ballots were counted,
Metsger would know how many voters
Q
backed him because of the Oregon
Working Families Party nomination.
This kind of fusion existed in Oregon
and other states in the 1800s, and con-
tributed to the election of populist politi-
cians. In 2007, advocates of fusion had
commitments from bipartisan majori-
ties in each legislative chamber, but
couldn’t get Democratic leaders to al-
low a vote.
That leadership opposition contin-
ued this year, so fusion backers pushed
a compromise proposal instead, which
they called “aggregated fusion” or “fu-
sion lite.” As spelled out in SB 326, bal-
lots will list, after candidates’ names,
all parties that have nominated them.
So voters will see that a candidate has
more than one party’s backing.
“It gives voters information about
candidates,” Dudley said, “but doesn’t
give candidates information about vot-
ers.”
The Oregon AFL-CIO stayed neu-
tral on the proposal, but the bill had the
support of the groups that back the Ore-
gon Working Families Party: United
Food and Commercial Workers Local
555, Pacific Northwest Regional Coun-
cil of Carpenters, Operating Engineers
Local 701, Teamsters Local 206, Com-
munications Workers of America, Ore-
gon Federation of Nurses and Health
Professionals, and International Long-
shore and Warehouse Union.
In the end, it passed 42 to 17 in the
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There was some doubt about
whether the governor would sign it.
Leaders of the Democratic Party of Ore-
gon were calling for a veto. But fusion
backers took their case to the editorial
boards of the Oregonian and the Eugene
Register-Guard, both of which penned
strong calls for the governor to sign the
bill. And Dudley got a statewide radio
audience for her arguments July 8, with
a guest appearance on Oregon Public
Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud.
Once the bill is signed, Oregon
Working Families Party will turn its en-
ergy to putting theory into practice. The
idea of the party is that working people’s
interests aren’t well enough represented
by the Democratic or Republican par-
ties, and need a party that will focus on
bread-and-butter issues. The Oregon
Working Families Party doesn’t take po-
sitions on social issues that sometimes
divide working people politically, like
abortion or gun rights. Instead, its plat-
form calls for:
• Health care for all Oregonians
without private profit;
• Debt-free higher education and
technical training;
• Creation of green family-wage
jobs;
• Affordable housing and an end to
predatory lending; and
CORRECTION
In the July 3 issue of the Northwest
Labor Press, an article about the just-
concluded Oregon legislative session
incorrectly reported that the state’s new
top tax rate on personal income will be
9 percent. In fact, 9 percent is the exist-
ing top tax bracket, on income over
$125,000. The new rate will be 10.8
percent on income over $125,000 and
11 percent on income above $250,000,
for tax years 2009, 2010, and 2011, and
after that, it will be 9.9 percent on all in-
come over $125,000. The Oregon
AFL-CIO applauded the change as a
move toward greater tax fairness, since
it means the well-off will pay an in-
creased share of the taxes that fund
things like schools and public safety.
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Tough boots for the Northwest.
AL’S SHOES
• Strengthening workers’ right to or-
ganize and negotiate with employers.
The party collected enough signa-
tures to earn statewide ballot status in
2006, but it has been reluctant to run
“spoiler” candidates — candidates who
are unlikely to win themselves, but
might take enough votes away from the
more favorable major party candidate to
result in a win for the less favorable ma-
jor party candidate.
However, to maintain its ballot sta-
tus, the party did run one statewide can-
didate in the 2008 election, and the re-
sults proved quite interesting. J. Ashlee
Albies, a Portland civil rights lawyer
and Working Families Party supporter,
was the party’s candidate for Oregon at-
torney general. Fellow candidate John
Kroger was virtually assured of victory,
because he was running with the nomi-
nation of both the Democratic and Re-
publican parties, plus the support of or-
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NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
ganized labor. That meant Albies could
test the waters for the Working Families
Party without jeopardizing the election
of a labor-endorsed candidate from an-
other party. To keep its ballot status, the
Working Families Party needed 1 per-
cent of the statewide vote; it got almost
11 percent, 161,655 votes — more than
twice that of the Green Party candidate
and very near the turnout for the con-
servative Constitution Party. And the
level of support for the Working Fami-
lies Party was higher — above 16 per-
cent — in counties that tend to vote Re-
publican: Crook, Grant, Harney,
Klamath, Lake, Malheur, Morrow,
Umatilla, Union and Wheeler.
Dudley said those results seemed to
validate the premise of the party — that
working people alienated by the two
major parties might be willing to vote
for a party that sticks to core issues of
economic justice.
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JULY 17, 2009