Justin again.  I had the “pleasure” of teaching Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party again yesterday.  Timmons was a federal constitutional challenge to “anti-fusion” laws: laws preventing two parties on the ballot from nominating the same candidate (and thereby preventing voters from demonstrating their preference for a candidate on one of two or more party lines).

And I was reminded, again, of two things:

• The remarkable sloppiness of the Court’s drive-by originalism as a rationale for allowing states to entrench a duopoly.  Whatever your view of the political science, it’s pretty clear that the Court gets Federalist No. 10 (and its warning against faction) exactly 180-degrees backward.
• The remarkably monochromatic nature of the public’s understanding of electoral options based on deep unfamiliarity not just with other countries’ systems, but our own history.  Fusion ballots are just one example of this, of course.  But even students who think they know a lot about Earl Warren as Chief Justice have no idea that he got both the Republican and Democratic nominations for Governor, or even that that’s a conceptual option.

In the latter vein, there’s a really interesting new paper out by Corey Brooks and Beau Tremitiere in the St. John’s Law Review reviewing how northern antislavery parties used fusion in the 1840s and 1850s to grow what would become the Republican Party.  I’m looking forward to digging in.