Why New York Ballots List Some Candidates Twice
A tweet calling New York's ballot "a scam" went viral in 2025. What Elon Musk missed is a 130-year-old voting rule that still shapes how minor parties compete today.
On the afternoon of Nov. 4, 2025, Elon Musk posted a photo of a New York City ballot and called the whole system a scam. "Other mayoral candidates appear twice," he wrote, pointing to Zohran Mamdani and Curtis Sliwa, each listed under two separate party lines. PolitiFact rated the claim False within hours.
Musk had stumbled into fusion voting, a 19th-century ballot mechanic that only New York and Connecticut still use. It is not a printing error. It is the reason minor parties in those two states get to matter at all.
Post by @elonmusk, Nov. 4, 2025
What fusion voting actually does
Fusion voting lets more than one political party nominate the same candidate. When two parties cross-nominate someone, that person's name appears once under each party's line, and voters choose which line they want their vote credited to. The candidate's final total is just the two columns added together.
Mamdani ran as the nominee of both the Democratic Party and the left-leaning Working Families Party. On Election Day, PolitiFact reported, he voted for himself on the Working Families Party line rather than the Democratic one. Sliwa carried the Republican line and a party he invented himself, the Protect Animals Party, built around his longtime animal-welfare advocacy. Every vote for either man counted toward his total no matter which line it came in on.
"Although candidates may appear on more than one party's line, voters can only vote for them once."
Julia Sass Rubin, Rutgers University public policy professor, in remarks to PolitiFact
Having a name printed twice isn't a loophole, either. "Having a candidate appear on the ballot twice is not a scam at all," Jerry Goldfeder, senior counsel at the law firm Cozen O'Connor, told PolitiFact. "New York has had fusion voting for many, many years."
Why would anyone vote for a major-party candidate on a minor party's line?
Because the vote sends a message the party can measure. A voter uneasy with the Democratic label but happy with Mamdani can back him on the Working Families line instead — and the resulting vote count tells that party, and the candidate, exactly how much support exists outside the two-party frame. Dan Cantor, who co-founded the Working Families Party and now advises the Center for Ballot Freedom, put it plainly to PolitiFact: fusion "allows voters the ability to vote their values and send a message to the candidate that he or she should be attentive to the minor party's concerns."
A 19th-century tool that outlived its ban
Cross-nominating candidates was once routine everywhere in the United States. Minor parties used it to push issues into the mainstream long before they had any hope of winning outright — abolitionist parties in the mid-1800s fused with anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats, eventually merging into the first major party built explicitly against slavery: the Republican Party, according to Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan legal advocacy group that tracks fusion-voting law. It's the same undercurrent running through other arcane corners of American political process — the Senate's custom of the senate hold, or the reconciliation-era Byrd Rule that strips out "extraneous" provisions — each one a procedural quirk that quietly decides who holds leverage and who doesn't.
That influence is exactly what got fusion banned. Around the turn of the 20th century, state legislatures across the country passed anti-fusion laws for one basic reason: the two major parties wanted less competition from upstarts. New York's highest court struck down the state's version of that ban in the early 1900s, and fusion has run continuously in New York ever since; Connecticut kept it too. Everywhere else, the bans held.
Is fusion voting connected to ranked-choice voting?
No, and the two get confused constantly. Ranked-choice voting changes how ballots are counted — voters rank candidates by preference, regardless of how those candidates were nominated. Fusion voting changes who can be nominated and by how many parties at once; it says nothing about how the count itself works. A state can run one, both or neither.
New York's system is what election-law scholars call "disaggregated" fusion: each nominating party's votes for a candidate are tallied and reported separately, which is how anyone can see exactly how many votes Mamdani drew on the Working Families line versus the Democratic one. A handful of other states, including Oregon and Vermont, allow multiple nominations but combine them into a single number on the ballot — "aggregated" fusion, which hides the breakdown entirely.
None of this stopped Musk's post from spreading. Other X users amplified similar complaints the same day, and the claim that double listings amount to fraud has surfaced in New York elections before — PolitiFact fact-checked a nearly identical rumor about voter ID back in 2022. What's different now is the venue: a tech billionaire with a vast following relitigating a 130-year-old ballot rule on Election Day, to an audience mostly encountering it for the first time.
Whether that audience grows depends partly on courts. Moderate parties in New Jersey and Kansas are currently suing to overturn their states' anti-fusion laws, arguing the bans burden voters' associational rights under their own state constitutions — a narrower and, as legal scholars wrote for the American Bar Association, potentially stronger path than the one the U.S. Supreme Court closed off in a 1997 fusion case out of Minnesota. If either suit succeeds, the two-state club that includes New York and Connecticut might not stay a club of two much longer.
