Loren Legarda announced her bid for vice president and was announced as running mate of Nacionalista Party presidential candidate Senator Manny Villar. United States Electoral fusion was once legal and common in the United States. Before the Civil War, fusion balloting was the preferred electoral tactic of abolitionist forces, who formed a number of anti-slavery third parties such as the Liberty and Free Soil parties. These and other abolitionist third parties cross-nominated major party candidates running under the Whig label, fusing more than one party behind a single candidate. Votes for fusion candidates were tallied first by party, then added together to produce the final outcome. After the Civil War, agrarian interest groups and the political parties they founded continued to use fusion balloting to forge a ‘‘temporary alliance between third parties and the weaker of the two major parties, usually the Democrats in the Midwest and West’’ (Argersinger, 1980, p. 288). Fusion allowed minor parties to avoid the “wasted vote” and “spoiler” dilemmas that small parties face in a non-proportional voting system. In the 19th and early 20th century, minor parties used fusion as a way to signal that their support for a major party candidate brought a meaningful number of voters to the candidate. Argersinger (1980) argues that this helped ‘‘maintain a significant third party tradition by guaranteeing that dissenters’ votes could be more than symbolic protest’’ (p. 288). The People’s Party (also known as the Populists) is regarded as the most successful third party of the era, and that success produced a counter-reaction from the dominant major parties, who then used state legislatures to enact bans against fusion in the late nineteenth and early 20th century. In northern and western states, fusion was largely banned by Republican-led legislatures. One Republican Minnesota state legislator was clear about what his party was trying to do: "We don't propose to allow the Democrats to make allies of the Populists, Prohibitionists, or any other party, and get up combination tickets against us. We can whip them single-handed, but don't intend to fight all creation." In southern states, fusion was largely banned by Democrats who supported Jim Crow, in an attempt to prevent political alliances between newly-enfranchised Black voters and poor white farmers. Most states banned fusion by the early 20th century. A few did so around the turn of the 21st century, including South Dakota in 1999, Delaware in 2011, and