The New County Unit System
By: Solomon Hillfleet
Tags: Social Justice, Politics, History, Society, Election 2020

The New County Unit System

For years Georgia has been a red state despite recent developments. It’s almost like they designed it that way.

Photo by Elliott Stallion on Unsplash

From 1948 on, the Democratic Party has moved to the left politically and to the north geographically. Herman Talmadge

For starters, I am an educator who works in a rural school system that is located in the deep Southern corner of Georgia. Our school system is roughly 70% black, and agriculture drives the bulk of the revenue our way as pecans, peaches, and cotton reign king. Yet there’s one thing that remains constant: No matter how much people believe things change, they inevitably remain more or less the same.

Last night, I watched the election and saw the results for the state of Georgia. Though we have yet to get the last score, that wasn’t what concerned me. I’ve known for years that metro Atlanta votes for Democrats and that for years it has remained one of the state’s loudest voices against voter suppression and tyranny. No, what struck me was when I looked at the states below the middle half of Georgia.

A cursory look at the counties below Macon, Georgia shows a united front by counties that led the state in rampant rates of poverty and social inequity. Of course, it is easy to suggest that the voting habits of the Black Belt and South Georgia reflect a lack of diversity and a singular focus on agriculture and farming.

But that’s not the issue. The voting power that the Deep South, Black Belt, and North Georgia regions hold brings to mind a system of controlling the vote in Georgia that limited the influence of Atlanta’s urban sectors and effectively ensured its rural sectors would remain in power.

The history of the county unit system

Courtesy of Emory University

The County Unit System is the name given for the 1917 practice of assigning electoral votes to Georgia’s population. Instituted under the Democratic Party, it divided the state voters into 3 sectors of urban, rural, and town. Urban areas were given six votes, town given four votes, and rural two votes.

Even though Atlanta and its surrounding counties had the largest population, the smaller counties together nullified their vote and in the same vein nullified the progressive politics that permeated the era during that time. For example, in 1946, Eugene Talmadge, an avowed segregationist won the election for governor despite losing the most populous counties in Georgia.

His promises to “preserve our Confederacy history” and “maintain our way of life” endeared him to white people across the state, many of whom viewed the progress of the New Deal as a threat to their agrarian way of life. While in office, Talmadge actively opposed the New Deal, appealed to white supremacy openly, and even removed professors and students from the University System of Georgia’s Board of Regents for “advocating communism or racial equality.”

Today

It took years of court appeals and lawsuits before they abolished the county unit system in 1962. Non-Georgians are not familiar with this piece of history, but after teaching Georgia History, it has remained in the front of my mind every time I read an article about obvious voting suppression tactics. Georgia has for all its glitz and glamour always been a state with two faces: One face is reflected by the glitz and glamour of Piedmont Park and downtown and then there’s the other face you see roaming through areas of North and South Georgia.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if the more things change the more they don’t. The one thing I do know though is that this election is shifting the ball more towards the middle than ever before.