Word: chiltons
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...first six decades of Willie Gill's life, the winding dirt road next to his house in Chilton County, Alabama, was a nuisance. If trucks weren't churning its surface into clouds of red dust, rains were turning it into a swamp. Gill, who is black, never really expected the all-white county commission to do much about it. "But Mr. Agee, he come and put in a paved road just about last year," Gill reports. "I'm glad to have...
Gill is no fire-breathing radical. Nor is Bobby Agee, a 43-year-old funeral director who six years ago became the county's first black commissioner since Reconstruction. Yet Gill's road would not have been paved had he and other Chilton County blacks not voted for Agee seven times apiece -- legally. It was an act that, radical or not, put them in the vanguard of a ballot-casting experiment called cumulative voting, one of a brace of methods hailed by some as the future of suffrage but labeled antidemocratic by no less an authority than Bill Clinton...
...study it in Maryland, however: Young's decision has been appealed. You must go to Chilton County, one of three sizable areas (the others are Alamogordo, New Mexico, and Peoria, Illinois) where cumulative voting is established...
Unlike Montgomery, 40 miles distant, Chilton has never been an activist hotbed, perhaps because this peach-farming flatland is only 12% African American. "The blacks pretty much blend in with us," says Judy Smith, who owns a Sno Biz shaved-ice stand. "Every once in a while they get rowdy, but they're not quite as bad as they are elsewhere." Be that as it may, in 1985 a black political group called the Alabama Democratic Conference brought a voting-rights suit against Chilton and some surrounding municipalities. Nearby towns opted to create black-majority districts, but Chilton's highly...
Academic proponents of cumulative voting swear by such a system's mathematical elegance. When filling seven seats, even though blacks make up only 11% of Chilton's voters, if they "plump" all seven of their votes for one candidate, that person should almost inevitably be elected -- without any outright governmental action on behalf of a specific minority. Of course, the same academics swear the system isn't confusing. Chilton County Probate Judge Bobby Martin, who oversaw the 1992 commission elections, differs. He says dozens of voters penciled in more than seven votes: "There were so many mistakes, we almost...