Word: unitized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Example: Fulton County (Atlanta), with 556,326 inhabitants, had only three times as many unit votes as tiny Echols County (pop. 1,876); thus, one Echols voter was roughly the equivalent of 100 Fulton voters. By winning pluralities (not necessarily majorities) in a lot of small rural counties, a politician could win the Democratic nomination for Governor with a minority of the statewide popular vote. The elder Talmadge did that in 1946 with 43% of the popular vote, and Marvin Griffin did it in 1954 with only...
Last week, all of a sudden, Georgia's county unit system was dead. It was an indirect victim of the Supreme Court's recent decision bringing the apportionment of seats in state legislatures under review by federal courts (TiME, April...
Scarcely more than an hour after the Supreme Court handed down its decision, an Atlanta citizens' committee filed suit in a federal court in Atlanta to have the county unit system declared unconstitutional. To ward off this new threat, the rural-dominated state legislature met in special session and hastily revised the county unit system, providing additional unit votes for the most populous counties...
...that failed to save the system. The county unit system, ruled the three-judge federal court in Atlanta, was "invidiously discriminatory," violating the "equal protection" clause. Conspicuous in the court room when the court delivered its ruling was Atlanta's ex-Mayor William B. Hartsfield, who had fought the county unit system all during his 24 years as mayor...
Massive Assault. The demise of Georgia's county unit system is the most striking of many reverberations from the Supreme Court's reapportionment decision. With remarkable speed, suits to force reapportionment have been filed or reinstituted in nearly a score of states. In Alabama a federal court has ordered the legislature to reapportion or have a court-ordered formula forced upon it. In Tennessee, where the stone that started the avalanche got rolling. Governor Buford Ellington announced last week that he was calling the legislature into special session to act on reapportionment. A suit challenging the apportionment...