The Law of Unintended Consequences was never enacted by the New York State Legislature. That's probably because there wasn't a lobby supporting it with campaign donations, and free food and drink for legislators.
But let's assume that good intentions were behind something the legislature did approve long ago: fusion voting. Under the Law of Unintended Consequences, fusion voting has turned out to be bad for New York.
Even so, it's unlikely to disappear because there's a lobby supporting it with campaign donations, and free food and drink for legislators.
You know the old saying that money talks? In New York politics, that conversation often involves a ballot line. Fusion voting is the practice that allows candidates to appear on more than one party line on the ballot and count all the votes together. It's illegal in all but eight states. Nowhere is it embraced as enthusiastically as in New York.
So Andrew Cuomo is a Democrat, but on the 2010 ballot he also was the candidate of the Working Families and Independence parties. He beat the Republican Carl Paladino, who also was the Conservative party candidate.
You may think this is great. It gives voters a home outside the two major parties, you might say. Since minor parties presumably are more philosophically pure than the Republicans and Democrats, they present a chance, you'd think, for a sweeter expression of democracy.
No offense intended, but that's hokum, by and large. Fusion voting encourages the sort of corruption most recently seen in the indictment of state Sen. Malcolm Smith, a Queens Democrat who prosecutors say was trying to buy his way onto the Republican ballot for mayor of New York. It leads to abuse of campaign spending, encourages unbridled patronage in hiring and breeds cynicism among people who truly do believe in the tenets of the minor parties.
Consider one fact and one relevant observation.
Fact: State law restricts how much money one person can give a candidate's campaign, but there are no limits on donations to a party's pot. This loophole makes minor parties a convenient way to channel extra cash to a candidate.
Observation: Minor party members are hired onto public payrolls at a rate far exceeding their numeric presence in the voting population. Could be they're just smarter than the rest of us. (For the record, by the way, I'm not a member of a political party.)
In practice, the minor parties exist mainly to serve as depositories for campaign donations and as power bases for people who otherwise wouldn't speak for enough voters to hold much sway. They invite corruption — not necessarily in the legal sense, but surely of the ethical variety.
Let history be our guide.
Back in 2001, when Michael Bloomberg first set out to run for mayor of New York, most of his votes came on the Republican line, but the Independence Party line gave him the margin of victory over his Democratic opponent. The next year, the city's Industrial Development Agency approved $8.7 million in financing for a charity headed by some Independence Party leaders. Bloomberg gave the party $250,000 before his 2005 race and $1.2 million during his 2009 campaign; each time, he had the party's line. Not that anyone should infer any quids pro quo.
Sometimes things don't work out quite as well. The Conservative Party gave its 2010 gubernatorial line to Rick Lazio, assuming he would be the Republican nominee. But when Paladino topped Lazio in the GOP primary, the Conservatives had to hustle to get Paladino onto their ballot and Lazio off, which the law says they could do only by putting Lazio up for a judgeship. A convenient sham race was found in Queens; Lazio luckily lost.
The Conservatives needed Paladino more than they liked him, because state law requires them to draw 50,000 votes on their line to maintain their automatic presence on the ballot. The carrion of the once animate Liberal and the Right to Life parties lie as warning for minor parties who fail to align with the Republicans or the Democrats.
Against this backdrop, the Green Party, whatever else you may think of it, stands as resolutely independent. It doesn't lend its line to non-Greens. This intellectual honesty is perilous: the Greens' energetic 2010 candidate for governor, Howie Hawkins, got 59,000 votes, barely keeping the line alive.
On the county and local level, minor parties often are targets for takeover by whichever major party can best strut its stuff in any given year. I've lost track of whether the Conservatives in Rensselaer County are really Republicans or Democrats; both major parties have had their way with the line.
This corruption could end if legislators would abolish fusion voting, as their counterparts in 42 states have done. That campaign reform would have real consequences. But no free food and drink. And on the other side there are some quite attractive ballot lines being offered as inducement.