On Tuesday, incumbent Sen. Raphael G. Warnock faces off against Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a Georgia runoff election. While Warnock received more total votes than Walker on Election Day, he didn’t reach the 50 percent threshold mandated by state law, forcing a final runoff between the top two candidates.
While this is a well-known law, many people may not realize that it is rooted in Georgia’s history of white supremacy. On June 24, 1964, just days before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Georgia’s Gov. Carl E. Sanders signed into law a bill that contained the majority-vote runoff provision for all primary and general elections. It weakened the impact of the Black electorate — which had grown in the wake of civil rights activism in the late 1950s and early 1960s — by requiring their favored candidate to win a majority of votes. This task was difficult to achieve in a multicandidate contest in which Black residents held a minority of the votes, both in county and statewide elections. Although Black Georgians have greatly increased their political power since the 1960s, the runoff continues to empower White Georgians and present an additional hurdle for candidates, such as Warnock, who have overwhelming support from Black voters. This was by design and we are still feeling its impact several decades later.
The runoff provision marked the culmination of nearly a decade of efforts to revise Georgia’s election procedures in response to federal government mandates to end Jim Crow racial segregation and Black voter disfranchisement. Beginning in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned racial segregation in public schools, while Congress passed two federal civil rights acts, in 1957 and 1960, seeking to protect the right to vote. Civil rights activists took advantage of these changes and held voter registration drives and registered voting-age Black citizens. It worked. The proportion of Black voters enrolled to vote in Georgia had soared to 44 percent in 1964, up from 29 percent in 1960.
In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered another blow to maintaining white supremacy by overthrowing Georgia’s unique county unit system of representation that had laid the foundation for rural domination of the state legislature and restricted Black political influence. Codified in 1917, the county unit system gave each of Georgia’s 159 counties twice as many unit votes as it had representatives in the lower State House. This allowed 121 rural counties to control nearly 60 percent of the unit votes even though they represented only 32 percent of the state’s population. This ultimately disadvantaged cities such as Atlanta that contained the bulk of registered Black voters. Both the arch-segregationist governor Eugene Talmadge and one of his moderate-segregationist successors Carl Sanders agreed that the county unit system kept Georgia government “conservative … and [kept] liberals and radicals from taking over.”
In response to all of these changes in the mid-20th century, Georgia political officials devised ways to evade or minimize such challenges to white racial domination. That included Denmark Groover of Macon, a prominent lawmaker and staunch white supremacist, who mounted a campaign for a majority-vote proposal in local and statewide elections.
Here was the idea. Most elections in Georgia featured multiple White candidates running in a winner-take-all, plurality election. That meant that even though only 40 percent of Black Georgians were registered to vote, their support increasingly could prove decisive for one White candidate or another. Groover wanted to avoid that. So his proposal required that if no contender received a majority of the vote, then there would be a runoff election between the two top vote-getters. Groover envisioned that if a Black-endorsed candidate made it to the runoff, then the majority-White electorate would rally around the other candidate. Thus, with the county unit system struck down and given the perceived danger posed by the plurality system, Groover favored a majority-vote provision that “would again provide protection” from rising African American political influence.
In 1964, Groover’s runoff bill passed the state legislature handily, and Sanders signed it into law. His willingness to support it exposed how widespread the desire to maintain White control over Georgia’s government was. Unlike Groover, Sanders was a moderate segregationist. As a state senator, he supported measures to evade the Supreme Court’s Brown decision and affirmed his loyalty to the “Southern way of life” and Georgia’s “sovereign states’ rights,” slogans wielded in the campaign to maintain racial segregation. He parted company, however, with politicians such as Groover by refraining from stirring up racial antagonism in his speeches and promising to preserve segregation through lawful means.
The election law signed by Sanders also contained a literacy test, which had long been a feature of state politics designed to thwart Black Georgians from registering to vote. The substance of the exam had been revised throughout the years. The new law established a 20-question standardized literacy exam for voter registration and required a passing grade of 15 correct answers. One of the act’s strongest legislative supporters summed up the reasoning behind its adoption, insisting it would continue to ensure that “illiterate [B]lack voters don’t get on the registration lists.” Actually, literacy for African Americans made little difference in passing the test, as biased White registrars determined who successfully met the requirements.
The adoption of the majority-vote, runoff requirement along with the literacy test clearly reflected Georgia’s pervasive racism and White leaders’ intention to keep themselves in power. Despite the passage of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act and the abolition of literacy tests, Georgia has maintained the majority-vote system to dilute Black voting power along with other voter suppression measures that target Black voters. Although civil rights groups have launched legal challenges to these discriminatory laws, they currently remain in effect.
Still, the Voting Rights Act has reshaped Georgia politics. Progress has come despite the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby v. Holder, which eviscerated key sections of the statute. Even so, while the decision provided states like Georgia new opportunities for reducing Black voter participation, Black voters still now constitute approximately one-third of the statewide electorate. Black candidates have also chalked up significant victories for the U.S. Senate, Congress, state legislature and mayor of major cities such as Atlanta. This spectacular transformation brings us to the current moment in the runoff race between Warnock and Walker.
Even Denmark Groover could not have anticipated such sweeping political changes. He could not have foreseen that today, two Black candidates are competing against each other in a runoff election for U.S. Senate — a mechanism that he hoped would keep even White candidates who appealed to Black voters from power. He would have been no less surprised that one of those candidates, Warnock, had narrowly defeated his White opponent, Kelly Loeffler, in a runoff election in 2021.
However, the racial effect of the majority-vote, runoff election requirement persist in 2022. White voters will be the deciding factor in the outcome of the runoff election between two Black contenders, just as Georgia’s political leaders intended in 1964. If Walker — who is expected to receive greater White support — defeats Warnock, he can thank Denmark Groover and Carl Sanders, who designed Georgia’s electoral system to allow White voters the final say on who governs the state.