Georgia’s run-off election has segregationist roots

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Georgia’s Dec. 6 runoff election pitting Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock against Republican Herschel Walker is historic for having two black candidates representing major parties in that state’s ballot. But the electoral law which provided for a second round when none of the candidates won a majority in the November elections is in fact a remnant of racist legislation.

Since the 1960s, Georgia’s majority voting law has required a candidate to obtain 50% or more of the vote to be declared the winner, and was introduced by a staunch segregationist lawmaker named Denmark Groover. Even now, the law makes it harder for any group that forms a minority in the population to elect their preferred candidates, regardless of the candidates’ ethnic background, said historian and California Institute of Technology professor Morgan Kousser. at PBS NewsHours Nicole Ellis.

Watch the conversation in the player above.

When so-called white-only primaries were ruled unconstitutional in 1946, black voter registration surged across the South, including in Georgia. In 1940, about 250,000 black Southerners were registered to vote, and that number rose to 775,000 by 1948, according to National Park Service data.

When Groover lost re-election to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1958 despite winning a majority of the white vote, data from separate Macon polling places revealed that black voters contributed to his upset victory. opponent,” Kousser said. In his book, Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction, Kousser writes that Groovers’ opponent triumphed by garnering black ballots by a margin of five to one.

As part of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, advocates, judges, and policymakers pushed for expanded and fairer voting rights. Fear of losing white political supremacy has prompted some white state and local lawmakers to act strategically to protect their racial agency in politics.

READ MORE: How Georgias Senate election runoff between Walker and Warnock will work

When Groover won his seat in 1963, he led the charge to break up what he described as the Negro Voting Block, moving Georgia from plurality voting, which allows the candidate with the most votes to win. be declared the winner, by majority vote forcing voters to choose between the two candidates with the most votes in a separate run-off. Kousser explains that majority voting may seem innocuous, but if the vote is racially polarized, the trickles down discriminate against black people because they are a minority of voters.

Two decades after introducing majority voting legislation, Groover left little mystery about his motives, saying in a deposition, “I was a segregationist. I was a county unity man. But if you want to establish whether I was racially biased, I was. If you want to establish that some of my political activity was racially motivated, it was.

Groovers’ perspective later changed, and he sought to alter the segregationist policies he helped champion early on, but majority voting and his segregationist roots remain in place.

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According to Kousser, this legacy creates a very tight race between Walker and Warnock. Black people make up about 30% of registered voters in Georgia and there’s still quite a racially polarized vote in that state, Kousser said.

In the Nov. 8 election, Warnock won 49.4 percent of the vote, while Walker won 48.5 percent, a tight contest where white and black Georgians split over their preferred candidate. According to AP VoteCast data on November midterm election results, 90% of African American or black voters favored Warnock, while a majority of white voters (68%) favored Walker. . Next Tuesday, Georgia’s next senator will likely be chosen by whichever party votes the most.

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