Tuesday, March 21st Agenda Warm Up: Review County Unit Jimmy Carter Answer the following on your warm up sheet: Now that you have learned more about the county unit system, explain how it disenfranchised or devalued the urban vote. Name two ways that Atlanta evolved during Governor Sanders administration.

The End of the County Unit System -Emory Scholarblogs

Under the county unit system each county was assigned a certain number of unit votes. This was based on their classification of either urban, town or rural. In the electoral college, each state is assigned a number of electoral votes. This is based on the population of each state. Since Georgia was a one-party state (Democrat) at the time, the primaries were basically the general election. Urban Example: Chatham; 6 unit votes; county population 151,481 Town Example: Gwinnett; 4 unit votes; county population 32,320 Rural Example: Long; 2 unit votes; county population 3598 The darker the shade of green, the more over represented the county is. The darker the shade of blue, the more a county is under represented. The white shaded counties were closest to equal representation based on their population.

Chatham: % of state pop.= 4.4%; % of unit votes= 1.463% (under) Gwinnett: % of state pop.= 0.94%; % of unit votes= 0.976% (almost equal) Long: % of state pop.= 0.10%; % of unit votes= 0.488% (over) Of these 3 counties, Gwinnett was most accurately represented with almost an equal percentage of the state’s population and the unit votes. Echols, Quitman and Glascock had 6 unit votes combined and a combined population of 9,267. Fulton had 6 unit votes as well but a much larger population of 473,572. Going by the three counties, one could say about 9,000 people equaled 6 unit votes. If that were true, there would be roughly 460,000 people in Fulton county whose votes did not count. Progressives and African Americans tended to live in urban counties. The county unit system gave these populations very little representation in government. Conservatives and white supremacists tended to live in rural counties. The county unit system gave these populations more representation than was equal in government. While winning the popular vote by more than 15,000 votes, Carmichael lost to Talmadge on the basis of the county unit system. Talmadge lost 5 of the 6 most populous, or urban, counties, but won in most sparsely populated, or rural, ones. Since rural counties were typically over represented, those were more important to win than urban counties.

The Supreme Court refused to hear these cases, calling them a matter of “apportionment” and should be left to the individual states to resolve. (Apportionment is the proportional distribution of seats in a legislative body, like our General Assembly, based on the population. For example, if we had 100,000 total population and 20 seats in the assembly, then every 5000 people would equal one seat. If one county had 12,000 people, then that county would get 2.4 or 2 seats. 1 seat = 1 representative) The League of Women Voters were among the most important organizations protesting the county unit system. The Republican party was re-organizing and opposed the county unit system. Baker vs. Carr set the rule of “one man, one vote”. This meant that all citizens’ votes should have the same weight. On March 18, 1963 (almost 50 years ago exactly!), the county unit system was officially declared unconstitutional in a Supreme Court decision known as Gray v. Sanders. Carl Sanders was the first governor elected from an urban center in 1962. (since 1919)

During Sanders’ administration, Atlanta completed its transition from a large southern city to a New South sunbelt metropolis. Sanders worked closely with Mayor Ivan Allen to attract new businesses in the city, helped Atlanta acquire a professional football and baseball team, and collaborated with the city government to build numerous new facilities to make Atlanta a premier city for large conventions.