Counting Votes, Georgia Style

Once in the seventies, during an ice-storm caused power failure that was days in duration, I fought boredom by grazing on my father’s bookshelves.  The best book I found was called Gothic Politics in the Deep South, by Robert Sherrill.   The book was composed mostly of profiles of Southern demagogues of the fifties and sixties – Orval Faubus, Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and the like – plus some reporting on Bob Jones University and other contributors to Southern political backwardness.   The chapters on Georgians Herman Talmadge and Lester Maddox were particularly fascinating to me.   Later I read William Anderson’s The Wild Man From Sugar Creek, a biography of Eugene Talmadge, Herman’s father, a colorful, corrupt, race-baiting, reactionary populist and the dominant figure in Georgia politics in the 1930s and early 1940s.  So at 17, I was better informed about Georgia political history than the typical Georgia teenager.   It was lucky for me that my first exposure to this history came through Sherrill, an entertaining writer with a biting sense of humor.  It was such a good book that as I first read it by candlelight in our unpowered house, it was almost possible not to notice that I was freezing my ass off. 

 

One of the things I learned about from Sherrill and others was what they called the “County Unit System.”   Because of lingering Civil War bitterness, Lincoln’s Republican Party remained a political nonentity in the South for 100 years.  In almost every old Confederacy state the only election that really mattered until the 1970s was the Democratic primary – the Democratic candidate would inevitably win in a landslide in the general election.   Of course the Jim Crow era Democratic Party of Georgia ran its primary election exactly as it pleased, excluding Black people from voting – contra the 15^th amendment – for as long as it could get away with it.  The County Unit System was another bit of skulduggery.   In the race for the Democratic nomination for Governor, the County Unit System was a kind of electoral college in which each of Georgia’s 159 counties was assigned a number of county unit votes that the winner of the popular vote in that county would earn.  The eight most populous counties in Georgia (“urban counties”) were worth six votes each.   The next 30 counties in size (“town counties”) were worth four votes each.   The remaining 121 counties (“rural”) were worth two votes each.  In practice, all other forms of unfairness in the voting process aside, this way of determining the winner gave low-population rural counties a vastly disproportionate share of political power in the state.  In 1960, for example, the 7000 people in Echols, Glascock, and Quitman counties (six county unit votes) had as much say in who would be governor as the 550,000 people in Fulton County.   The system was so tilted against city dwellers that Eugene Talmadge once boasted that he would never have to campaign in a county populous enough to have streetcars.  

 

In almost every instance the winner of the popular vote and the county unit vote were the same person, usually by a large margin.  1946 was a notable exception – James Carmichael defeated Eugene Talmadge in the Democratic primary by almost 20,000 votes but lost the county unit vote 244-144.  Talmadge won the general election, of course, but died before he could take office, and what followed has to be one of the most fascinating trainwreck / clownshows in the history of American politics, the "Three Governors Crisis".  It featured - among other things - 58 miraculously discovered write-in ballots, some of them cast in alphabetical order, a feat surpassed only by the dead people who cast some of the other ones.*  

 

Lawsuits ultimately ended the white primary (1944) and the County Unit System (1962).   With the coming of the Voting Rights Act (1965) and actions of the brave people who put themselves in danger to extend the vote to all adult citizens, the South was truly on its way to a more just manner of choosing elected officials.  

 

I don’t have to tell anyone who has been paying attention how much backsliding there has been on this progress the last few years. That backsliding has accelerated ominously in the last few weeks and days.  It is such a misbegotten effort.  Thinking about the County Unit System and the political figures behind it, I note that history never looks favorably on those who endeavor to make sure that some people’s votes don’t count or count less, or who try to rig the system in their favor instead of trying to win on the merits of their politics.  I can't think of an instance where disenfranchisers were on the right side of history.  People who try to pull that stuff inevitably look like villains in the long run.

As comedian George Wallace (a different George Wallace than the one pictured on the cover of Sherrill's book) tweeted the other day, "If you don't want the votes of your fellow Americans to be counted, what the hell happened to you?  That's some soulless shit right there."   

* The political descendants of the perpetrators of this electoral fraud are - not surprisingly - the ones who routinely and bogusly accuse the other side of cheating