Fusion is when two or more parties nominate the same candidate for the same office. All votes for that candidate count towards the candidate s total, regardless of which party generated them.
Fusion is a powerful tool for minor parties for two reasons.
First, the major parties are strongly inclined to choose candidates that are acceptable to the minor parties, even if those minor parties can only bring them a few percent of the votes. Those few percent can often mean the difference between winning and losing the election. Minor parties can therefore exert a strong influence on the candidate selection of the major parties, and thus on the eventual makeup of the government. Second, fusion eliminates the wasted vote syndrome because voters can cast their vote for a minor party knowing that they are not only making a ideological statement, but since they are voting for a candidate who has a real chance of winning, that their vote has an influence on the outcome of the election. The minor parties therefore get more votes, making it easy to see how much support they really have.