Jennifer Dresden and Deborah Apau from Protect Democracy have an important new report just out on how fusion voting and proportional representation complement each other in the work of strengthening American democracy.

So it’s exciting that Dresden joined Micah Sifry on the latest episode of "This Old Democracy" to whet your appetite for reading the full paper – Fusion as a Pathway to Proportional Representation: Lessons from Global Experience and American Electoral Heritage (link below).

Dresden explains one of the paper’s core arguments, that fusion voting could help foster the kinds of parties that can open up the party system and channel demands for further reform. “What fusion would do is create the space and the ability for more minor parties to grow, to flourish, to build skills and organization and relationships with communities in ways that they could then be the vehicle that would push for reform,” like proportional representation.

The scholarly breadth of the Dresden/Apau paper encompasses case studies of how other countries transitioned from dysfunctional governance to healthier, proportionate multi-party democracies. On the podcast, Dresden highlights the lessons we can learn from New Zealand’s transition from a failing winner-take-all system to a fairer, more responsive proportionate election system. The story of a major party winning a majority of the popular vote, but a minority of legislative seats should sound familiar to American audiences.

As discouraging as the daily news can be, Dresden finds optimism from the American journey. Sifry suggested that the enactment of reforms in just a couple of places (for example, in the states where efforts to revive fusion voting are currently being litigated) could catalyze interest in more reform. Dresden agrees: “[T]here is a lot more diversity in the way that Americans have done democracy, right, and are doing democracy now in terms of how we run our elections, than I think we all appreciate. We have a much more diverse heritage than we realize, and I think that we should sort of open up the scope of our understanding about what is possible… We can learn a lot of lessons from overseas, but we don't actually have to look that far to sort of feed that imagination.”

Read the Dresden/Apau report – “Fusion as a Pathway to Proportional Representation: Lessons from Global Experience and American Electoral Heritage” – here:

https://protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Fusion-PR-pathway.pdf