There'll Be Some Changes Made

Not until it is honest to give eight ounces for a pound and only fifty cents for a dollar can the county unit system be anything but deception and fraud.

--Editorial in the Atlanta Journal, 1917 The late Georgia Politician Eugene Talmadge used to say that he didn't care if he never carried any county that was big enough to have a streetcar. And he had good reason to feel that way: by aiming his appeal at the back-country farms and hamlets, rough-cut "01' Gene" got himself elected Governor four times. So solid was his power that he was able to pass it down to his son Herman, who was twice Governor and is now a U.S. Senator.

01' Gene's power was built upon Georgia's county unit system, one of the most bizarre devices in U.S. state politics. The system applied only to primaries, but in Georgia the Democratic primaries are the only important elections (no Republican has been elected to statewide office in Georgia in this century). The system as signed each county a certain number of "unit votes" -- the 38 most populous counties had six or four votes apiece, and each of the remaining 121 counties had two votes. A county's unit votes went to the candidate who got the most popular votes, and the candidate with the highest number of county unit votes won the election.

Indirect Victim. Under this arrangement, the ballot of a voter in a little piney-woods county was a lot weightier than the ballot of a voter in a large city.

Example: Fulton County (Atlanta), with 556,326 inhabitants, had only three times as many unit votes as tiny Echols County (pop. 1,876); thus, one Echols voter was roughly the equivalent of 100 Fulton voters. By winning pluralities (not necessarily majorities) in a lot of small rural counties, a politician could win the Democratic nomination for Governor with a minority of the statewide popular vote. The elder Talmadge did that in 1946 with 43% of the popular vote, and Marvin Griffin did it in 1954 with only 36%.

Last week, all of a sudden, Georgia's county unit system was dead. It was an indirect victim of the Supreme Court's recent decision bringing the apportionment of seats in state legislatures under review by federal courts (TiME, April 6).

That case directly involved only the Tennessee legislature, but the principle applied to any state in which citizens could claim that disproportional representation violated the 14th Amendment's requirement of "equal protection of the laws."

Scarcely more than an hour after the Supreme Court handed down its decision, an Atlanta citizens' committee filed suit in a federal court in Atlanta to have the county unit system declared unconstitutional. To ward off this new threat, the rural-dominated state legislature met in special session and hastily revised the county unit system, providing additional unit votes for the most populous counties.

But that failed to save the system. The county unit system, ruled the three-judge federal court in Atlanta, was "invidiously discriminatory," violating the "equal protection" clause. Conspicuous in the court room when the court delivered its ruling was Atlanta's ex-Mayor William B. Hartsfield, who had fought the county unit system all during his 24 years as mayor.

"We waited a long time," Hartsfield said happily. Said Atlanta's present mayor, Ivan Allen Jr.: "It would be difficult to catalogue all the evils that have resulted from the system over the years. But from now on there are going to be big changes."

Massive Assault. The demise of Georgia's county unit system is the most striking of many reverberations from the Supreme Court's reapportionment decision. With remarkable speed, suits to force reapportionment have been filed or reinstituted in nearly a score of states. In Alabama a federal court has ordered the legislature to reapportion or have a court-ordered formula forced upon it. In Tennessee, where the stone that started the avalanche got rolling. Governor Buford Ellington announced last week that he was calling the legislature into special session to act on reapportionment. A suit challenging the apportionment of seats in the Georgia legislature is scheduled before a federal court in late May.

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