  The Figure of Merit Science Working Group (FoMSWG) recently forecast the
constraints on dark energy that will be achieved prior to the Joint Dark Energy
Mission (JDEM) by ground-based experiments that exploit baryon acoustic
oscillations, type Ia supernovae, and weak gravitational lensing. We show that
cluster counts from on-going and near-future surveys should provide robust,
complementary dark energy constraints. In particular, we find that optimally
combined optical and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect cluster surveys should improve
the Dark Energy Task Force (DETF) figure of merit for pre-JDEM projects by a
factor of two even without prior knowledge of the nuisance parameters in the
cluster mass-observable relation. Comparable improvements are achieved in the
forecast precision of parameters specifying the principal component description
of the dark energy equation of state parameter as well as in the growth index
gamma. These results indicate that cluster counts can play an important
complementary role in constraining dark energy and modified gravity even if the
associated systematic errors are not strongly controlled.
