Electoral fusion allows smaller parties to pool their votes. For the minor parties, endorsing a major candidate ensures its survival and allows it to influence a candidate’s platform. For candidates, it allows them to sometimes get crucial votes that provide the margin of victory in a close election. Also called Open Ballot Voting, fusion voting allows multiple parties to “cross endorse” a candidate for office.

Fusion voting is working so well in New York and other states that it is beginning to enjoy a revival. Connecticut reinstituted it. Massachusetts is studying reinstating it.

But contrary to this national trend, South Carolina came by its fusion voting accidentally, and has been trying to expel it from its body politic ever since, including a legislative attempt to kill it last year.

The latest attempt is its poison-pill “sore loser” code that the legislature is trying to enforce against Eugene Platt, the Green Party candidate for a South Carolina House seat. Because Platt failed to win the endorsement of the Democratic Party, the South Carolina Election Commission decided that Platt was ineligible to appear on the ballot under the Green Party banner.

The ACLU has filed a lawsuit today to put Platt on the ballot in November on the Green Party line.

Bryan Sells, a senior staff counsel with the ACLU Voting Rights Project, has never seen the “sore loser” code enforced the way South Carolina is seeking to do.

“The Green Party just had its nominee vetoed by Democrats,” he said. “They’ve had the rug pulled out from under them. If I lived in that district and I support Eugene Platt, I’d be mad as hell.”

Platt won the nomination of a recognized party but is being bounced. Not only is the effort anti-democratic, it changes party power, party dynamics in really pernicious ways. Fusion increases democratic choices that voters have. But fusion voting, combined with this so-called “sore loser” code, reduces those choices.

Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s world-famous political prisoner who became his nation’s first democratically elected president, turns 90 years old this summer.

Fourteen years ago, under a full Autumn moon, about two poignant minutes apart before midnight and after — I witnessed a white soldier lower South Africa’s old flag for the last time and a black soldier raise his nation’s new colors.

The people of South Africa — including, for the first time, the majority black population — had gone to the polls in a jubilant, chaotic and epochal election and altered the course of their nation’s bitter history. A liberation election finally put the beast of apartheid in the grave and Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela into power as president of South Africa.

“I will concentrate on those things which give hope to all South Africans,” Mandela, who was the symbol and instrument of the anti-apartheid struggle, said on being elected.

The original white Dutch settlers arranged things so that whites would hold the power and wealth of the nation. Hendrik Verwoerd and his cohort in 1948 codified those policies into apartheid — the system of racist laws and policies by which South Africa’s 5.6 million whites oppressed 24 million blacks and others of mixed race for half a century. Verwoerd never expected blacks to vote. By the 1980’s, however, South Africa, the last colonial outpost on the African continent, had become a pariah nation, apartheid reviled, its economy tottering on the edge of collapsing from the strain of sanctions and the unrelenting violence of the liberation struggle.

Then-president F.W. de Klerk told the Times of London the reason apartheid had to end:

“A more conservative government might possibly keep the lid on the pot for another five years. But, after that, the pot will explode and blow us and our future into the air.”

He found an essential partner in Nelson Mandela. Mandela, born July 18, 1918, was a lawyer, then an activist and, finally, an opponent of apartheid. South Africa's white government put Mandela on trial for treason in 1963. At his sentencing, Mandela proclaimed his ideals:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Mandela was imprisoned and held on the harsh Robben Island for 27 years, during which his legend grew almost too great for any one man to bear.

“I am not prepared to sell the birthright of the people to be free,” he once proclaimed to his jailers on being offered freedom in exchange for giving up the fight against apartheid. He had received numerous such offers since 1963. De Klerk, six months after assuming the presidency, lifted the ban on political activity by Mandela’s group, the African National Congress, and gave Mandela his unconditional release from prison.

De Klerk and the old liberation fighter then hammered out a new Constitution for South Africa.

When Mandela won the presidency, following the 1994 election, it was a remarkable transition to which I was a witness: for perhaps the first time in human history, a tyrannical leadership voluntarily gave up power to the very people it had long oppressed. Mandela, at his moment of triumph, spoke from his heart and danced like a boy. It was a victorious day for all South Africans, he proclaimed. “The people have won.”

But no one knew better than de Klerk how bitter the struggle ahead could be.

“Mr. Mandela has walked a long road and stands at the top of the hill,” de Klerk said. “A traveler would sit down and admire the view, but a man of destiny knows that behind this hill lies another hill, and another. The journey is never complete.”

To win South Africa's presidency, though a great leap forward, was a poisoned chalice: A lifeboat with too many people on one side, Mandela must steer the country through dangerous waters: ethnic rivalry, black anger and white anxiety. For whites, would they flee the country or cower in their homes awaiting the black horde to come and take away the wealth they spent a lifetime accruing? And for the long oppressed majority black population, how could anyone, even their beloved Mandela, counsel patience at this moment of their triumph?

The problems facing Mandela and his new government were staggering: 40 percent unemployment, 50 percent illiteracy, widespread crime and political violence that had killed more than 11,000 people since 1990, ethnic polarization and the impatience of tens of millions of blacks demanding a better life now that apartheid is over.

Those very early years after the historic election were perhaps the most dangerous for the new nation of South Africa. A less sure hand and the country would quickly slide into chaos. Mandela led by example. He served one term in the presidency and yielded power to a successor, an exceptional transition on the continent of Africa, where liberators soon turn to despots.

But no one should have expected anything different from the courageous Mandela; he is fond of saying “If you are in harmony with yourself, you may meet a lion without fear.”

Although the actual date is not until July 18, many around the world have already begun saying “Happy 90th birthday, Madiba!” with more than 20 events around the world through the year, including a kick-off birthday concert today in London’s Hyde Park.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court heard Virginia v. Moore, a Fourth Amendment case that's been wending through the judicial system for nearly five years.

The petitioner, David Lee Moore, happened to be driving by police officers Anthony and McAndrew on February 20, 2003, in Portsmouth, Va., at just about the moment that Detective B.J. Karpowski was alerting them to keep an eye out for an ex-con nicknamed "Chubs," who was believed to be driving with a suspended license.

The "Chubs" Karpowski was referring to was Christopher Delbridge, a man just released from a federal prison whose driving privileges the detective knew were suspended. But, as Moore's luck would have it, he shared with Delbridge this unfortunate nickname. In fact, "Chubs" is the name that officer Anthony knew Moore by. Moore also happened to be driving on a suspended license.

And so it came to pass that cops looking for Delbridge that day, found Moore.

Operating a vehicle with a suspended license in Virginia is a Class 1 misdemeanor offense, and officers are required to do nothing more than issue a citation to appear in court, and then release the offender. But rather than simply cite and release Moore, officers Anthony and McAndrew chose to handcuff and arrest him, an option unavailable to them under Virginia state law.

"Do you have any drugs on you?" officer Anthony asked Moore, adding, "where are you staying?"

Moore told him he was staying at an Econo-Lodge in Chesapeake. The officers asked him to sign a consent form allowing them to search his hotel room without a warrant. He signed the form. The officers searched Moore's room, then searched Moore himself and discovered that he had 16 grams of crack cocaine and $516 in his pants pockets.

At his trial for possession of drugs with intent to distribute, Moore protested the use of the drug evidence. The search violated, among other things, his Fourth Amendment right protecting him against unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant. In addition, the officers violated a state law that prohibits arrests for misdemeanors. But Moore's trial judge didn't buy these arguments. He convicted him.

A three-judge panel of the Virginia Court of Appeals found the search illegal and threw out the verdict. But when Virginia's attorneys appealed this verdict before the full, 11-judge panel, the court's majority reinstated Moore's conviction. While conceding that state law forbade arresting Moore simply for driving with a suspended license, the court made a confounding decision that neither the arrest nor the subsequent search violated the Fourth Amendment. Their reasoning? An arrest based on "probable cause," which the majority found Moore's to be, is not unconstitutional. Therefore, the subsequent search did not violate the Fourth Amendment either.

Moore's attorneys took the second decision from the appeals court to the Virginia Supreme Court, which, in a unanimous decision, reversed the lower court's second ruling.

Now Moore finds himself before the U.S. Supreme Court today. The high court will settle once and for all whether the Virginia police officers violated Moore's Fourth Amendment rights, as our friend-of-the-court brief maintains. We hope the justices will find that officers Anthony and McAndrews acted outside the rule of law by violating Moore's constitutional right against unreasonable searches and seizures.