Georgia’s December 6 runoff, which pits Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock against Republican Herschel Walker, is historic because two black candidates representing major parties are on that state’s ballots. But the electoral law, which mandated a runoff if neither candidate won a majority in November’s election, is actually a holdover from racist legislation.
Since the 1960s, Georgia’s first-past-the-post system, requiring a candidate to receive 50 percent or more of the vote to be declared the winner, was introduced by a staunch legislator known as Denmark Groover. Even now, the law “makes it harder for any minority group in the population to vote for their preferred candidates,” historian and California Institute of Technology professor Morgan Kousser told PBS NewsHour’s Nicole Ellis, regardless of who ethnicity of the candidates .
Watch the conversation in the player above.
When so-called “white-only primary” elections were declared unconstitutional in 1946, black voter registration rose sharply throughout the South, including Georgia. In 1940, an estimated 250,000 black Southerners were registered to vote, according to the National Park Service, and that number rose to 775,000 by 1948.
When Groover lost re-election to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1958 despite winning a majority of the white vote, data from segregated polling stations in Macon showed that black voters contributed to his opponent’s disgruntled victory, Kousser said. In his book Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction, Kousser writes that Groover’s opponents “triumphed by receiving black ballots by a five-to-one advantage.”
As part of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, lawyers, judges, and policymakers pushed for expanded and fairer voting rights. Fear of losing white political supremacy prompted some white state and local legislators to act strategically to protect their racial power in politics.
CONTINUE READING: How the Georgia Senate runoff between Walker and Warnock will play out
When Groover regained his seat in 1963, he led the charge in breaking up what he called the “Negro voting bloc” by moving Georgia from majority voting, where the candidate with the most votes can be declared the winner, to a majority Voting – voters are forced to choose between the two candidates with the most votes in a separate runoff. Kousser explains that majority voting may seem harmless, but when voting is racially polarized, “runoff elections discriminate against blacks because they are a minority of voters.”
Two decades after the enactment of first-past-the-post electoral legislation, Groover kept very little in the dark about his motives, stating in a statement: “I was a segregationist. I was a district unit man. But if you’re trying to determine if I was racially prejudiced, I was . If you’re going to state that some of my political activity was racially motivated, that’s it.”
Groover’s perspective later changed and he attempted to change the segregationist policies he had advocated early on, but first-past-the-post elections and their segregationist roots remain.
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According to Kousser, this legacy makes for a very close race between Walker and Warnock. “Blacks make up about 30 percent of Georgia’s registered voters and there’s still quite a racially polarized vote,” Kousser said in that state.
In the Nov. 8 election, Warnock received 49.4 percent of the vote while Walker received 48.5 percent — a close contest that saw white and black Georgians split over their preferred candidate. According to AP VoteCast data on November midterm election results, 90 percent of African American or black voters preferred Warnock, while a majority of white voters — 68 percent — preferred Walker. Next Tuesday, the next Georgia senator is likely to be chosen by the party that votes in larger numbers.
