Georgia’s county unit system gave rural counties wildly disproportionate political power.

Evidence

As Georgia undermined black voters through disfranchisement and discrimination, it likewise weakened urban voters through the “county unit” system. Under this scheme, installed in 1917, statewide and congressional contests were determined not by the popular vote, but through an arcane electoral arithmetic instead. Originally, each county in Georgia was granted twice as many unit votes as it had members in the lower house of the legislature. The eight most populous counties received six votes each; the next largest thirty took four votes apiece; and the remaining 122 counties each had two. In elections, the candidate with a plurality of votes in a county took all of its votes. When the system was first installed, the distribution of unit votes roughly corresponded to that of the state’s population. The allotments were not tied to population shifts, however, but instead remained fixed. As urban populations grew and rural ones shrank, the county unit system thus ensured that smaller counties wielded wildly disproportionate political power. (In 1946, for instance, 14,092 votes from Atlanta’s Fulton County carried precisely the same weight as 132 votes from rural Chattahoochee County.) Because of this imbalance, candidates in statewide races simply ignored the cities and concentrated on the fourand two-unit counties of the countryside. As a result, Georgia politics embodied, in the apt phrase of political scientist V. O. Key Jr., the “Rule of the Rustics.” — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 55

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the county unit system clearly with its arithmetic and its effect of amplifying rural over urban votes.