Today's episode of The Weeds is focused on the Georgia Senate elections so feels like a good time to explain the strange, racist, and muddled history of why Georgia has run-off elections! Thread (1/?)

If you want to read my full article on this link below, but I have some fun historical tid-bits included in this thread that didn't make it into the final piece! https://www.vox.com/21551855/georgia-ossoff-perdue-loeffler-warnock-runoff-election-2020-results

From 1917 - 1962, Georgia had a unique system called the "county unit system." It gave the most populous counties 6 votes and the least populous 2.

Sound familiar? As UGA professor Charles Bullock put it -- it was essentially a "poor-man's electoral college."

45 years after it was instituted, a resident of a large counties sued “claim[ing] that the county unit system violated the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause...[He] claimed his vote had less of an influence on the nomination...than that of a rural voter."

The case made its way all the way to SCOTUS which ruled 8-1 against GA.

The liberal Warren court held in Gray v. Sanders that “the conception of political equality...can only mean one thing — one person, one vote.”

Enter Denmark Groover, a prominent state representative.

As Georgia was forced to come up with a new system, Groover was worried that Black people would be able to strongly influence the outcome -- he blamed an earlier electoral loss on "Negro bloc voting"

Groover ended up leading the fight to enact run-off elections in primaries and general elections if no candidate received more than 50% of the vote. The logic was to hamper Black voters preferred candidates' viability by forcing them to compete for more white votes:

There are some that don't believe this was intentionally a racially exclusionary system -- they point to good governance concerns, for example the "stalking horse" tactic.

Sometimes people would enter fake candidates with similar sounding names to split opposition votes.

This happened to Governor Carl E. Sanders who would go on to sign the majority-vote requirement into law. In the 1962 Lt. Governor's race his opponent entered a candidate named "Carl F. Sanders" to confuse voters.

Sanders dropped out of the race and ran for Governor instead.

But most think it was intended to suppress Black ppl:

One Rep. recalls Groover saying: ‘[W]e have got to go the majority vote b/c...the Negroes and the pressure groups and special interests are going to manipulate this State and take charge if we don’t go for the majority vote.”

And as if to simplify the historical record, decades after Groover fought to institute run-off elections, he admitted he was a segregationist and that his political activity was racially motivated.

It's no secret that racists aren't the brightest brunch, so it shouldn't be surprising that the efficacy of this system in suppressing Black votes is... disputable.

(there were obviously other more blatant ways Georgia suppressed the rights of Black voters)

In 1990, H.W. Bush's DOJ sued the state of Georgia calling the system "an electoral steroid for white candidates."

Funnily enough, some folks (including @LarrySabato) thought they were doing it to help Republicans and only pretending to care about racial injustice.

The logic here was that run-offs in the primary theoretically yield a stronger candidate in the general since they're forced to get 50% approval from their party. By allowing plurality victory, weaker candidates will get through and Republicans will get to face them.

In any case, it ended up going to the Supreme Court which ruled in Georgia's favor, saying that it wasn't enough to point to the fact that a lot of racist people designed the system - you had to show that it had hampered the ability for Black candidates to succeed.

Data from 1970-1995 showed there were 278 runoffs involving a Black candidate running against a white candidate

85 times the candidate who won the plurality of votes in the primary lost the runoff

2/3 of the time it was the Black candidate who lost after an initial victory

So Black candidates and white candidates are not losing at the same rate, but the state's political science expert argued that if you ignored race and just looked at "strong leaders" (people who won primaries with more than 40% of the vote or by at least 5%)...

... the data showed that Black candidates who lost tended to enter runoff elections in a weaker position.

That complicates things for sure. And the plaintiffs didn't provide clear evidence that there would have been more Black candidates in the absence of this system.

But as the court put it "the virus of race-consciousness was in the air" (which is the best-worst euphemism for racism I've ever heard).

and it's hard to respect a system that was designed by racists to harm Black people. Even if that system may not have done its job.