The “New” Disfranchisement

By Winnett Hagens and Ellen Spears

Vol. 20, No. 3, 1998 pp. 3-4

Because the core premise of a democratic society is that legitimate rule is based on the consent of the governed, the linchpin of our democratic order is fair representation. And fair representation begins with access to the ballot. In an intentionally democratic system like ours, rules about who is allowed to vote inevitably affect who gets what.

In American history, outright disfranchisement has been one of the most common tactics employed by propertied interests seeking to protect their advantages. Nowhere has disfranchisement worked better to preserve and entrench rule by a narrow segment of privilege and wealth in American society than its use in the South following Reconstruction. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, white elites began building what V.O. Key in his 1949 book Southern Politics called “the most impressive systems of obstacles between the voter and the ballot box known to the democratic world.” Since readers of Southern Changes are familiar with the inventory of ballot obstructions (literacy tests, poll taxes, all white primaries, etc.) instituted under segregation, the subject needs no elaboration here.

By today’s standards, those methods of outright disfranchisement-the “old” or traditional disfranchisement-are crude and blunt mechanisms of control. The “old” disfranchisement simply stole and denied the right to vote. The “new” disfranchisement gives people the vote, and in doing so it breathes life into the illusion of a society based on consent. This “new” disfranchisement steals from the voters not their ballots but their choice of candidates and representatives. It also steals the power of the vote through dilution. Taylor Branch, in his book , captured the essence of the “new” disfranchisement when he quoted civil rights worker Bob Moses in 1964: “The best way to keep someone a slave is to give him the vote and call him free.”

Camouflage-concealing the potent and polarizing influence of race and money in politics-is the distinctive feature of the “new” disfranchisement, which we examine in this issue of Southern Changes. The “new” disfranchisement is not enforced by police with billy clubs and tear gas. Voter intimidation persists, as witnessed in the multi-faceted assault on the use of absentee ballots and black political power in Greene County, Alabama. (See “Voting Rights on Trial Again in Alabama,” by veteran activist Anne Braden, Summer 1998, Southern Changes.) Yet, even where such intimidation is absent, having a vote feels utterly pointless for voters if they have little or no hope of using it to protect their interests. The willful retreat from justice in voting rights is a classic case in point.

“The simple fact is that virtually all districts in which whites are a majority elect white candidates…. For blacks to win,” wrote Lisa Handley and Bernard Grofman in the 1994 book Quiet Revolution in the South, “it is therefore still necessary in the South to draw districts in which blacks are a majority or a supermajority of the population.” Even though it is beyond dispute that African Americans and Latinos have almost no chance of electing community-based candidates of their choice without district geographies holding a preponderance of their voters, federal courts have repeatedly rejected districts where race is a major factor as unconstitutional. The courts’ rulings in the 1993 Shaw case and its progeny are “racially unfair and nearly unmanageable,” explains Laughlin McDonald in his article, “Redistricting at the Millenium,” quoting Supreme Court dissenters who point out that the recent rulings disadvantage the very group they were designed to help.

When the smoke screen of litigation lifts, we are left with a legacy no carefully crafted electoral remedy can circumvent, the enduring fact of white racial bloc voting. “Until racial bloc voting diminishes, black-majority congressional districts are one appropriate and necessary means of ensuring that black candidates are afforded an equal opportunity to compete for-not win-office,” argues Harvard public policy professor Keith Reeves in “When a Black Face Turns Away White Votes.” Reeves shares his innovative research on media messages and white racial bloc voting in an excerpt from his 1997 book,“Voting Hopes or Fears?: White Voters, Black Candidates and Racial Politics in America.”

Sometimes circumstances-whether court rulings or geographical dispersion-preclude the use of districting as a leveling mechanism. In “Monopoly Politics: Southern Style,” Center for Voting and Democracy Director Rob Richie explores an alternate route to fair representation for minorities, suggesting proportional representation as one way out of low turnout, uncontested elections and the limits of the winner-take-all system. Proportional systems are in effect in more than 200 localities in the U.S., including a number of communities in Alabama and Texas. They work to enfranchise any political minority-whether a racial or ethnic group, or a political party.

Of course, unless and until such systems enjoy more widespread use, incumbent politicians control the redistricting process. Allan Lichtman shares his predictions of

---

Page 4

expanded Republican power in the South after the November elections and the attendant consequences for the 2000 Census and the redistricting to follow.

In a special section, we explore what competes with race as a powerful disfranchising mechanism-Money in Politics-and the growing movement to curb its influence. Huge and growing sums of money are now required to capture public office. Any candidate reaching the ballot in today’s world has already been pre-selected by an invisible “wealth primary,” a “new-old” method of exclusion from decision-making. Advocates Randy Kehler, Sharon Basco, Gwen Patton, Stephanie Anthony and Pete McDowell outline what’s at stake in this democratic fight for Clean Money and Clean Elections.

Criminal disfranchisement laws, the denial of the right to vote of people convicted of crimes have a disproportionate impact on African American males. Earl Shinhoster questions the unequal effect of these laws, with 1.4 million (one in seven) black men denied the right to vote due to present or prior felony convictions.

Jim Blacksher brings us back to the starting point: our society’s legitimacy rests on the consent of the governed. Wholesale disfranchisement, delivered through unjust voting rights decisions, criminal disfranchisement laws, and the power of money, plainly contradicts the principle of consent. In departing from this principle, he says, the Shaw majority “would make interracial legislative dialogue constitutionally illegitimate and black political influence once again impotent.”

Sadly, calls for genuine interracial dialogue have been all but buried in what passes for governance these days. The success of that interracial political dialogue requires fair representation of political interests-in a system that disfranchises no one.

Winnett Hagens is director of Fair Representation Programs and Ellen Spears is communications director at the Southern Regional Council.

The Midterm Elections in the South: Another Democratic Slide?

By Allan J. Lichtman

Vol. 20, No. 3, 1998 pp. 4-5

The notion that Bill Clinton saved the Democratic party by moving it from the left to the center of the political spectrum is another convenient theory exploded by inconvenient facts. During the Clinton years Democrats have suffered the worst drubbing at the polls since World War I.

Democrats have lost control of both houses of Congress and of numerous state house and senate chambers. Since 1990, the number of Democratic governors has declined from twenty-nine to sixteen. Of the ten largest states, only Florida and North Carolina still have Democratic governors.

Nowhere has the decline of the Democratic party been more evident than in the once solidly Democratic South. Today, Democrats control a minority of U.S. House and Senate seats and governors’ mansions in the South.

There is little chance that Democrats will reverse the Republican tide in the South in the midterm elections of 1998. Rather, these elections will likely bring additional Democratic losses in the South and elsewhere, with profound implications for the 2000 Census, the post-Census redistricting, and policies that affect U.S. minority groups.

Given that Democrats in the South are as far or farther behind Republicans in U.S. Senate seats and governorships as in U.S. House seats, Democratic losses in the South cannot be attributed to the creation of majority-minority House districts following the Census of 1990. The Democrats’ Southern problem is neither caused by nor subject to remedy by redistricting. Rather, it reflects a huge decline in votes cast for Democratic candidates.

In most Southern states there are no longer enough Democratic votes to create majorities for Democratic statewide candidates or Democratic congressional delegations. In Georgia, for example, the Democratic share of votes cast in congressional races fell from 61.3 percent in 1990 to 45.5 percent in 1994. In North Carolina, the Democratic share fell from 54.7 percent to 43.8 percent.

Thus far Democratic losses in the South have largely been confined to white voters. In most Southern states, Republicans can routinely count on 60 percent or more of the white vote. But, there are signs that Democrats may be losing their near-unanimous support from Southern black voters. In the 1997 elections for governor of Virginia, victorious Republican candidate James Gilmore garnered a record 20 percent vote from African Americans. In Florida, with white and black Democrats squabbling, Republican gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush seems poised to make

---

Page 5

significant inroads into the black vote. In other Southern states, similar though less serious rifts between black and white Democrats have emerged as well. Even a small loss in black support would have devastating consequences for Democrats in the South.

Although there should be no major shifts of party power in the South this year, chances are that the Democrats will slide further downhill. If the Clinton scandals explode further prior to November, that slide could be even steeper than is now expected. In governor’s races, Democrats could lose two of the most important states the party still holds: Florida and Georgia, both of which have retiring Democratic governors. In Florida, Republican Jeb Bush is expected to defeat Democratic Lieutenant Governor Buddy MacKay. In Georgia, wealthy Republican businessman Guy Millner is perched to prevail over Democratic State Representative Roy Barnes. Another tight race is shaping up in Alabama, where Democratic Lieutenant Governor Don Siegelman faces incumbent Republican Governor Fob James, who won easily after a brutal primary struggle.

House and Senate races in the South also present greater opportunities for Republicans than Democrats, especially in a midterm election with the White House in Democratic hands. Not since 1934 has the party of the President made gains in Congress during a midterm election. In the Senate, Republicans have a decent chance to pick up an open seat in Kentucky and the seat held by Ernest F. (Fritz) Hollings in South Carolina. The most vulnerable Republican is Lauch Faircloth in North Carolina.

In the House, about fifteen seats are in play, with Republicans having about two or three more opportunities than Democrats. In Alabama’s Fifth Congressional District, Republicans may defeat Robert E. (Bud) Cramer, the last white Democratic Representative in that state. Already there are no white Democratic House members in Georgia and only one in Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama. If there is a broad ripple effect on Democrats from the scandals, even some of the South’s black Democratic members of Congress could be in danger this November.

The likelihood of expanded Republican power in the South and nation virtually guarantees that the 2000 Census will be conducted without the sampling needed to reduce the undercount of minorities. Even if the Supreme Court authorizes sampling, Republicans will likely have enough power in Congress to block use of the procedure in the 2000 Census. It means that far more so than in 1980 or 1990, redistricting will be controlled by Republicans whose power depends greatly on white votes. And it means less support for affirmative action and civil rights programs.

There is no quick fix for the declining electoral prospects of Democrats. The party may have to undergo a large-scale reconstruction like the Republicans pulled off in the 1970s. New issues are on the horizon of the twenty-first century. Among others, these include: the nation’s potentially ruinous entitlement obligations; the increasing concentration of income and wealth among a small segment of the population; inequality in educational opportunity; genuine reform of the political system; the corrosive effects of the global economy; and, ongoing racial divisions.

If the Democratic party is to thrive in the new millennium, it cannot simply accommodate itself to Republicans. The party needs to seize control of the battle for new ideas, reinvigorate its grassroots base, and develop new mechanisms for communicating its ideas to the public.

Allan J. Lichtman chairs the Department of History at American University in Washington, D.C. He has participated as an expert witness in more than fifty federal voting rights and redistricting lawsuits and is the author of The Keys to the White House, 1996: A Surefire Guide to Protecting the Next President, Madison Books (1996).

When A Black Face Turns Away White Votes…

By Keith Reeves

Vol. 20, No. 3, 1998 pp. 6-7

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s flawed but significant rulings on race-based districting, two central questions remain: What happens when a black face turns away white votes and can blacks be elected from settings where whites comprise a majority of the population? With the Court’s developing jurisprudence of racial gerrymandering, racial pluralism in Congress has been dealt a signifcant blow.

In the entire checkered history of this country, only nine blacks have ever won election to the U.S. Congress from election districts where whites were overwhelmingly in the majority. Following the 1990 reapportionment, black congresspersons were elected from Florida for the first time ever, and from Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia for the first time in more than a century.

One of those riding the crest of political change in 1992 was Louisiana’s Cleo Fields, the twenty-nine year-old state senator from Baton Rouge. With prodding from the Department of Justice, the state legislature interpreted the 1982 proviso to the Voting Rights Act to mean that “where a majority-black district could be created, one must be created.” Thus, to gain approval of its reapportionment plan, it carved out the district from which Fields was elected. Of seven congressional districts, Louisiana now had two that were predominantly black-the Second and the Fourth. William Jefferson’s geographically compact Second District in the New Orleans region was relatively easy to configure(see map). By stark contrast, Field’s widely dispersed district, the “‘Z’ with drips” district stretched from the northwestern city of Shreveport to his home base of Baton Rouge.

But the Justice Department’s policy of creating majority-black districts met with fierce criticism. Disputants charged that the districts convey the impression that voters were segregated on the basis of race, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Furthermore, intentional racially configured voting districts, they alleged, “raise the specter of racial quotas, deepening racial and ethnic cleavages, and minority political ghettos.” “These districts are reserved for black candidates; no white candidates need apply,” one detractor argued. Besides wrote another, “[r]ace relations suffer when ‘electoral remedies’ favor one racial group.”

Such sentiments resonated with the U.S. Supreme Court when it ruled in 1993 (in ) that the shape of two majority-black congressional districts in North Carolina were suspiciously race-driven and subordinated traditional districting practices such as geographical compactness and contiguity, in particular. The five-member conservative plurality, speaking through Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, reasoned: “So bizarre on its face” were the districts that it “rationally cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to segregate citizens into separate voting districts on the basis of race.”

Indeed, O’Connor maintained that North Carolina’s majority-black First and Twelfth districts resembled “the most egregious racial gerrymanders of the past” and, accordingly, violated the constitutional rights of all voters to participate in a “color-blind” electoral process. That said, North Carolina would have to demonstrate that its reapportionment plan was not drawn for an expressly racial purpose or, if so, that the plan was “narrowly tailored to further a compelling governmental interest.” Contorted majority-black electoral districts in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, all drawn after the 1990 census, were now open to legal challenge by disaffected whites.

Meanwhile, the Court plurality applied its reasoning in Shaw v. Reno two years later, when it invalidated Georgia’s majority-black Eleventh District, represented by Cynthia McKinney, the state’s first black congresswoman. The Court concluded that the state legislature’s emphasis on race when it drew the boundary lines was “predominant” and thus unconstitutional.

Like it or not, a great many of us are left to contemplate the profound and vast implications of the Court’s evisceration of race-based legislative districting. Justice John Paul Stevens grasped the dire, if not muddled, ramifications of the Court’s rulings. In poignant, pointed language, he epitomized the concerns of many: “The decisions issued…serve merely to reinforce my conviction that the Court has…struck out into a jurisprudential wilderness that…threatens to create harms more significant than any suffered by the individual plaintiffs challenging these districts….I cannot profess to know how the Court’s developing jurisprudence of

---

Page 7

racial gerrymandering will alter the political and racial landscape in this Nation-although it certainly will alter that landscape.”

As Steven Holmes of The New York Times put it, “[T]he country will soon have to face a practical question that all those legislative contortions were intended to avoid: Will whites vote for black candidates?”

For the last several years, white and black Americans across the country have been engaged in polemic and contentious discussions about the perils of affirmative action. And, in some critics’ minds, majority-black districting amounts to “affirmative action in the voting booth.” This is a simplistic and trivial characterization of both the nature and extent of the problem. Race remains this country’s deepest and most enduring division. Racial discrimination was the problem in the 1965 campaign for voting rights, and even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act that year, it remains so today.

The presumption was that stringent enforcement of this law would remedy the problem of black voters’ disfranchisement. And to a great extent, the legislation has. But thirty years after the passage of the act, an intractable problem remains that neither Congress, state legislatures nor the courts can ignore the prevalence of racial bloc voting on the part of whites.

To date, virtually all of the electoral data on the prevalence of racial bloc voting has been in the aggregate registration and turnout figures. This information does not enable us to understand why citizens vote as they do.

To ascertain whether whites’ political choices are motivated by racial animus, for example, I conducted a biracial campaign study experiment. Approximately 110 white respondents in the study were asked to read one of two news stories that described a hotly contested and racially polarized election campaign between two mayoral candidates. One group of respondents was given a news story about two white candidates while the other group was given the same story, only in this case the race of the two candidates was changed, one candidate was black, the other white.

A research investigation of this kind is significant for the following reasons. First, the study provides direct information about the motivations and sentiments underlying white voting behavior toward a black office-seeker. For instance, respondents were queried about their: (1) racial attitudes; (2) evaluation of the candidates; and (3) vote choices “if the election were held today.” Second, the fact that many voting-rights disputes cover small jurisdictions or past events means that individual-level survey instruments for these cases are usually not available and cannot be constructed. This experimental campaign study enables us to peer inside the privacy of the ballot box. Third and most important, if it can be shown that whites’ limited receptivity toward a black office-seeker is due to racial animus independent of political orientation, qualifications, and experience, age, reputation, or some other personal attribute is an affirmative remedy not warranted?

Thus, several striking conclusions emerge from this biracial election campaign study. First, the study showed conclusively that those whites who read the news story of the contest between the black and white candidate were reluctant to vote for that black candidate despite the fact that he possessed identical credentials, political experience, and personal characteristics as his white counterpart depicted in the other news story. Furthermore, the study found that in a racially polarized political campaign, whites’ aversion to voting for a black candidate is associated with their attitudes, opinions, and stereotypes of black Americans as a categorical group. A black candidate seeking the support of white voters is evaluated accordingly. Such racial bias unfairly burdens black candidates who ought to have an equal opportunity to compete for elected office on the basis of their qualifications, experience, issue stances and personal character.

Racial bloc voting on the part of whites perniciously stacks the electoral deck against any black candidate, particularly in circumstances in which that candidate competes against a white opponent. One must ponder what it says about our society that thirty years after the tumultuous campaigns of the 1960s, a black American who runs for office is not afforded an equal opportunity to compete for white votes.

Americans of all political and ideological stripes must acknowledge racial bloc voting for what it is a formidable barrier to aspiring black political candidates. Until racial bloc voting diminishes, black-majority congressional districts are one appropriate and necessary means of ensuring that black candidates are afforded an equal opportunity to compete for, not win, office. This is not a special privilege. Rather, it is a remedy to level the political playing field. And although five redistricted black members of Congress were returned to office in 1996, it is beyond dispute that race loomed large in those elections.

The merits of majority-minority districting ought to be evaluated from the vantage point of bringing real meaning to notions of equal opportunity and racial pluralism. As the Supreme Court continues its wade into the “jurisprudential wilderness of racial gerrymandering,” it is imperative that the justices affirm these fundamental concepts. To do so, they must come to grips with the fact, however dispiriting, that racial bias still plays a role in the voting booth.

Keith Reeves is an associate professor of public policy in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was an expert witness in Hays v. Louisiana, III, a federal court challenge to the creation of Louisiana’s Fourth majority-black congressional district.

Redistricting at the Millennium

By Laughlin McDonald

Vol. 20, No. 3, 1998 pp. 8-10

As we await the 2000 census that will trigger another round of redistricting at the congressional, state, and local levels, the U.S. Supreme Court has laid down a minefield of problems. In a series of 5-4 decisions, beginning with Shaw v. Reno in 1993 (which has caused the destruction of majority black and Hispanic congressional districts in Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Florida, Virginia, Louisiana, and New York), the Court has made redistricting not only racially unfair but nearly unmanageable. It has also created an elaborate set of special rules that can only be described as affirmative action for white voters, allowing them to challenge majority-minority election districts. The Justices who dissented in the Shaw line of cases have correctly noted that the Court’s new standards are “unworkable” (Breyer and Souter), lack “a definable constitutional core” (Stevens), “render redistricting perilous work for state legislatures” (Ginsburg), and “place at a disadvantage the very group, African Americans, whom the Civil War Amendments sought to help” (Breyer).

One principle which does emerge with disquieting clarity from the recent redistricting decisions is that majority black and Hispanic districts are held to a more stringent standard than majority-white districts. The Court struck down the majority-minority congressional districts in the Shaw line of cases on the grounds that the districts were bizarrely shaped and the states had “subordinated” their traditional redistricting principles to race. The Court, however, had never called into question the constitutionality of a majority white district on account of its bizarre shape, or because the jurisdiction subordinated its traditional redistricting principles to race.

There is, of course, a long and continuing tradition of drawing majority white districts, including those that are highly irregular in shape and disregard “traditional” districting principles, to protect white incumbents. The old Eighth District in Louisiana drawn to ensure the re-election of white Congressman Gillis Long, and District Six in Texas created in the 1960s and known as “Tiger” Teague’s district after the white congressman of the same name, are two of many examples. Bizarrely shaped majority white districts had always been regarded as immune from challenge under the Court’s often stated principle that a regular looking district shape was not a federal constitutional requirement.

Non-traditional, oddly shaped majority white districts were also drawn in the 1990s. The Congressional Quarterly has described District Four in Tennessee (96% white) as “a long, sprawling district, extending nearly 300 miles . . . from east to west it touches four States-Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, and Virginia.” The Eleventh District in Virginia (81% white) has “a shape that vaguely recalls the human digestive tract.” District Nine in Washington (85% white) has a “‘Main Street’ [which] is a sixty-mile stretch of Interstate 5.” District Thirteen in Ohio (94% white) “centers around two distinct sets of communities . . . [t]he Ohio Turnpike is all that connects the two.” No court has ever held or suggested that any of these oddly shaped majority-white districts were constitutionally suspect.

In the recent Texas redistricting case, Bush v. Vera (1996), the plaintiffs challenged twenty-four of the state’s thirty congressional districts, eighteen of which were majority white. The district court invalidated just three districts-the only two that were majority black and one that was majority Hispanic. The court admitted that the other districts were irregular or bizarre in shape, but held that they were constitutional because they were “disfigured less to favor or disadvantage one race or ethnic group than to promote the re-election of incumbents.” The oddly shaped majority white districts, designed to keep white incumbents in office, were tolerable as “political” gerrymanders, while the oddly shaped majority-black districts, designed to provide black voters the equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, were intolerable as “racial” gerrymanders.

On appeal, the Supreme Court affirmed. According to Justice Kennedy, “[d]istricts not drawn for impermissible reasons or according to impermissible criteria may take any shape, even a bizarre one.” Justice O’Connor said in Shaw v. Reno that “reapportionment is one area in which appearances do matter.” In light of the Texas case one can conclude that appearances do indeed matter, but only where the districts in question are majority-black or Hispanic.

---

Page 9

When it comes to bizarre district shape, if it’s white it’s all right.

Prior to Shaw, the Court frequently said that one of the essential purposes of redistricting was to “reconcile the competing claims of political, religious, ethnic, racial, occupational, and socioeconomic groups.” For that and other reasons, voting districts have regularly been drawn to accommodate the interests of Irish Catholics in San Francisco, Italian-Americans in South Philadelphia, Polish-Americans in Chicago, and Anglo-Saxons in North Georgia.

In light of Shaw, however, blacks and Hispanics are now the only racial or ethnic groups that are targeted for special disadvantages in the redistricting process. All others may organize themselves politically and press for a fair or maximum share of recognition in redistricting. The comparable efforts of blacks and Hispanics alone are subject to the exacting and debilitating standards of strict scrutiny. Such a result cannot be reconciled with the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. As Justice Stevens wrote in his dissenting opinion in Shaw, “[i]f it is permissible to draw boundaries to provide adequate representation for rural voters, for union members, for Hasidic Jews, for Polish-Americans, or for Republicans, it necessarily follows that it is permissible to do the same thing for members of the very minority group whose history in the United States gave birth to the Equal Protection Clause.”

Equally offensive to any principled notion of equal treatment under the Fourteenth Amendment are the special rules the Court has developed allowing white voters to challenge majority-black districts. Aside from creating a new cause of action based on district shape, the Court has dispensed with any requirement that white voters prove a discriminatory intent on the part of the legislature, and has relaxed the traditional notion of standing, i.e, that a plaintiff has suffered a direct and personal injury, to bring a case to federal court.

In Shaw the white plaintiffs did not claim that the state’s congressional plan diluted white voting strength. And in Johnson v. Miller, the 1995 redistricting case from Georgia, the trial court found that the white plaintiffs “suffered no individual harm;” the state’s plan had “no adverse consequences” for white voters. The lack of a concrete and personal injury, which has always been required as a condition for bringing a case to federal court, should have denied the white plaintiffs “standing.” The Court held, however, that the plaintiffs had standing because they alleged that their right to participate in a “color-blind” electoral process had been violated. The injury was in being “stereotyped” or “stigmatized” by a racial classification, i.e., being put in a majority-black district.

The problem with the plaintiffs’ argument was that the Court had previously held that a similar abstract, hypothetical, or stigmatic injury was insufficient to confer standing upon black voters to challenge discriminatory governmental action. In Allen v. Wright (1984) the Court rejected a challenge by blacks to alleged discrimination by the Internal Revenue Service on the grounds that “stigmatic injury, or denigration” suffered by members of a racial group when the government discriminates on the basis of race was insufficient harm to confer standing.

The Court also dispensed with any requirement that the white plaintiffs prove the state intended to discriminate

---

Page 10

against them in drawing a majority-black or Hispanic district. The Court reasoned that a racial classification was apparent or “express” where a majority black district had a “bizarre” shape, and that accordingly “[n]o inquiry into legislative purpose is necessary.” In cases involving blacks, however, the Court has applied a much more stringent test. In City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980) the Court set aside a constitutional challenge by black voters to at-large elections in Mobile, Alabama on the grounds that they failed to prove by direct evidence that the system was established or was being maintained with a racially discriminatory purpose. Even proof that the voting strength of blacks had in fact been diluted was, according to the Court, “most assuredly insufficient to prove an unconstitutionally discriminatory purpose.”

Before the millennium census precipitates another round of redistricting, the Supreme Court should reconsider its unfortunate and misguided Shaw cases. They have created subjective and unworkable standards. Legislators no longer know the extent to which race can or should be taken into account in drawing district lines, the result of which has been to draw the federal courts increasingly, and unnecessarily, into the redistricting process. The Court has created rules that give political preferences to whites and shackle racial minorities with special disadvantages in redistricting. That this should be done in the name of the Fourteenth Amendment is one of the intolerable ironies of the Court’s modern redistricting jurisprudence.

States may legitimately consider race in redistricting for a variety of reasons-to overcome the affects of prior and continuing discrimination, to comply with the Fourteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act, or simply to recognize communities that have a particular racial or ethnic makeup to account for their common, shared interests. Only when the consideration of race causes real harm, such as the denial or abridgment of the right to vote or participate equally in the electoral process, should there be a warrant, and an obligation, for federal judicial intrusion.

Laughlin McDonald is director of the Voting Rights Project, the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Who Pays for Election Campaigns?

By Randy Kehler

Vol. 20, No. 3, 1998 pp. 10-12

Anyone who stops to think about how we Americans finance election campaigns knows that this process makes a mockery of our democratic ideals and betrays the principles of political equality and “one person, one vote.” It’s a matter of common sense that in politics as in everything else, those who “pay the piper” will always “call the tune.” And it will remain that way until we make that process fair, representative, and accountable.

So, who does pay for the process of campaigning for public office? According to a recent survey supported by the Joyce Foundation, most of the money that funds federal elections comes from those who make contributions of at least $200. That group of donors accounts for less than one-quarter of one percent of the population. This tiny elite is incredibly unrepresentative of average Americans: 95 percent are white and fewer than one percent identify themselves as persons of color (even though people of color comprise nearly a quarter of the U.S. population). Eighty percent of these big donors are men, and nearly half are over the age of sixty. Eighty-one percent have annual incomes over $100,000 (as compared to under five percent for the general population), and 20 percent of them have incomes over $500,000 (as compared to 0.29 percent for the general population).

This “contributor class” is not just unrepresentative in their backgrounds; they are equally unrepresentative in their outlooks. The same study found that more than half support cutting taxes even if that means reducing public services. By a two-to-one margin, the contributor class opposes cutting defense spending and supports free trade “even if jobs are lost.” And a plurality reject national health insurance and disagree with spending more to reduce poverty. Each one of these positions is at odds with those of the general public. With most incumbent politicians preoccupied with raising money for their re-election campaigns and willing to do the bidding of their financial backers, is it any wonder that we have a government that is more concerned about profits for weapons manufacturers and capital gains for the wealthy than about public services, jobs, and health care for everyone else?

What discourages most of us even more than the rank inequality and unfairness of the political process and its dire consequences in the policy-making arena, is the apparent hopelessness of seriously overhauling that process. Those who bother to pay attention to the campaign finance

---

Page 11

debate in Washington, D.C., know that even the most minimal reforms routinely go down to defeat, year after year. Unfortunately, we’re locked into a kind of “Catch-22.” With no bold, comprehensive reform proposals on the table, the public isn’t inspired to weigh in. Yet the absence of a mobilized public demanding real reform limits the “politically viable” reform options to the kinds of piecemeal changes that, even if passed, wouldn’t make much of a dent anyway.

But hold on. There’s something happening beyond the Washington Beltway. Far reaching reform proposal are on the table in a growing number of places around the country. This November the voters of Arizona, Massachusetts, and most likely New York City, will all have a chance to approve “Clean Money” campaign finance systems for state or city elections that could make the current corrupt and corrupting system a thing of the past. Under a Clean Money system, qualified candidates who are willing to reject private money and abide by spending limits receive equal, yet ample, amounts of public funding to cover all their campaign costs. And should they face a privately financed opponent who spends beyond the Clean Money amount or is helped by “independent expenditures,” they receive additional funds.

Such a system was passed by voters in Maine in November of 1996 and by the state legislature of Vermont in June of 1997 (laws which will go into effect in the year 2000 and after the 1998 general elections, respectively). And there are at least a dozen other states where Clean Money bills are headed for the ballot in 1999 or 2000, or where (in states without ballot initiative provisions) they are due to be introduced and fought for in state legislatures during the next session. Altogether there are more than thirty states where coalitions of groups-senior citizens, environmentalists, trade unions, good government groups- have started organizing around the Clean Money concept. Coordinating and providing resources to this growing state-based effort is a new national organization called Public Campaign whose longer-term goal is to translate this grassroots momentum into a focused national campaign capable of forcing Congress to enact a Clean Money system for federal elections.

Perhaps the most interesting is that more and more people are starting to define the elections problem not as a “campaign finance” issue, a designation that, for better or worse, tends to put people to sleep, but, as one church group in Kalamazoo, Michigan, recently put it, as a “justice issue.” William McNary, a much-respected African-American leader in Chicago, echoed that perspective when he says, “Clean Money campaign reform is about three things: freedom, morality, and power.”

Even more pointedly, veteran Montgomery, Alabama, civil rights activist Gwen Patton has said that what we are talking about is a voting rights issue. “Getting private money out of public elections,” Patton declared, “is the unfinished business of the Voting Rights Movement.” (See interview with Patton on page 16.)

The Supreme Court has made clear that the right to vote is not only the right to pull the lever but also the right to cast a meaningful vote. Indeed, this was codified by the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act, which prohibit any system or arrangement that causes certain voters to have “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” The anti-democratic way in which we finance the campaigns of candidates for public office is a prime example of such a “system or arrangement.”

Accordingly, Clean Money citizens coalitions in states across the country-including many in the South (see box on page 22)-jointly designated the week of September 21-27, 1998, as a “national action week,” with the theme “Clean Money Is a Voting Rights Issue.” During that week, Public Campaign released research report entitled, “The Color of Money.” Taking advantage of innovative computer technology and data from the Census Bureau and the Federal Election Commission, the report examines zip code areas by race, income, and campaign contributions. Here’s an example of the findings: the aggregate amount of 1995-1996 federal campaign contributions from one wealthy zip code area in Atlanta was 30 percent greater than the amount that came from all eighteen of Atlanta’s zip code areas comprised of at least 50 percent people of color.

Ultimately, what is needed is not just the effective abolition of privately-financed elections, but real progress on a number of other political reform fronts as well. These include finding equitable alternatives to the current single-member, winner-take-all election districts; bringing down states’ ballot access restrictions for non-major party candidates; and removing the remaining barriers to voter registration (which, at a minimum, means making sure the “Motor Voter” law is fully and universally implemented).

Because all these and other changes go hand in

---

Page 12

hand, those of us who pursue them must work hand in hand. Just as the Civil Rights Movement was composed of people working separately yet together on different aspects of the problem, from the segregation of public facilities to the denial of voting rights for African Americans, it is time to bring together under one over-arching banner today’s related issues of political reform. Call it the “Civil Rights Movement Continued,” or the “Political Rights Movement,” or the “Fair Representation Movement,” or the “New Democracy Movement”–it doesn’t matter.

The important thing to is expand our vision and enlarge our work, with the aim of bringing about a fundamental, nationwide re-examination and re-formation of what we mean by, and how we practice, democracy.

Randy Kehler, who lives in Massachusetts is a founding member of the Working Group on Electoral Democracy, and a consultant to Public Campaign. For more information about Clean Money Campaign Reform, call Public Campaign at 202-293-0222, or check out their web site www.publicampaign.org.

Incomes/Outcomes: Campaign Finance as a Civil Rights Issue

By Sharon Basco

Vol. 20, No. 3, 1998 pp. 13-15

Throughout United States history, the right to vote has been defined, expanded, contracted, and refined. Textbooks call voting “the most elemental form of democratic participation.” So why, then, at the close of a century that has seen hard-fought, persistent campaigns to win and ensure the right to vote, do so few people choose to participate? One hundred years ago, 80 percent of registered voters went to the polls; today,only one-third vote in Congressional elections, and fewer than half in Presidential races.

Why the apathy? Here are the two most common answers: (1)My vote doesn’t matter; (2) The candidates are pretty much all the same.

Let’s examine those two simple notions. On the “vote doesn’t matter” ledger, we can consult one of America’s most famous non-voters, Roger Tamraz. He’s the multimillionaire businessman who startled U.S. Senators last fall by sharing with them his experience that money buys access in politics, and big money buys big access.

Tamraz’s September, 1997, testimony came as a rare, amusing break from the mind-numbing proceedings before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. “If you do a favor for a politician, he won’t forget you,” Tamraz explained as his motive in writing $300,000 in checks to Democrats last year. “This is politics as usual.” Non-partisan with his monetary attentions, Tamraz had earned “Republican Eagle” status in the ’80s for his contributions to Ronald Reagan’s campaigns.

Tamraz testified that his generosity paid off handsomely when he was able to bend President Clinton’s ear about his scheme for a $2-billion Caspian Sea oil monopoly. “So do you think you got your money’s worth?” Senator Joseph Lieberman [D-Conn] asked. “I think next time I’ll give $600,000,” Tamraz answered.

Senators expressed shock when Tamraz told them he’d never registered to vote. “I think [money] is a bit more than a vote,” Tamraz told the Senators. “The New York Times” reported that moment succinctly: “In the great scheme of democracy, Mr. Tamraz testified, he considered his checkbook far more potent than his unused ballot franchise.”

American voters seem to believe that their elected representatives are unprincipled enough to rate contributors’ money higher than ordinary citizens’ votes: a poll showed that just 14 percent of the people give members of Congress a high rating for honesty and ethical standards.

“Under the present campaign finance system we have lost that very important link between the office holder and the voter,” according to Sara Clark, president of the League of Women Voters in Georgia, adding that the public well knows that. “The primary factor for being a successful candidate is money. In a recent survey done by the national League of Women Voters, the number one reason for low voter turnout is not apathy, but a feeling by voters that their vote simply is not connected to the decisions made by the elected official.”

To a large extent, the viability of candidates for office is measured by the size of his or her war-chest. Voters can see that the best-funded candidate wins office, the well-funded incumbent stays there, and much of an officeholder’s time and energy is devoted to fund-raising. Politicians publicly bemoan this money-sick system: on the subject of campaign finance reform, the past decade has seen the U.S. Congress produce 6,742 pages of hearings, 3,361 speeches, 1,063 pages of committee reports, 113 Senate votes and one bipartisan commission.

Do American voters believe all this scrutiny and discussion add up to a genuine commitment for reform by the 105th Congress? “In one survey . . . nearly half the people polled said they were more likely to see Elvis Presley alive than reform legislation passed by Congress,” reported pollster Celinda Lake in the Capitol Hill newspaper, Roll Call this past March.

And that takes us from (1) my vote doesn’t count, to (2) the candidates are pretty much all the same. Why do major party candidates seem interchangeable, representing safe and predictable political positions? In part, it’s because they’ve been pre-selected through the “wealth primary,” a system that was identified and named by an American University constitutional law professor, Jamin Raskin, and John Bonifaz, executive director of The National Voting Rights Institute. Simply put, the “wealth primary” is the process by which wealthy people and corporations control who participates in-and who almost always wins-elections.

“Thank God we’re a capitalist society and there’s nothing wrong with running after money,” Roger Tamraz told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. But what deity should non-multimillionaires petition to seek equality in a money-driven system?

---

Page 14

The “wealth primary” deprives the non-wealthy from meaningful participation in elections. It’s an exclusionary process, leading up to every party primary and general election, in which those with money or access to money (by means of their campaign contributions) choose the candidates who almost invariably go on to govern. Prospective candidates who don’t raise enough money – and who thus lose the wealth primary-almost always fail to win office.

This theory is at the heart of litigation in several states aimed at eradicating the primary barrier in our political process and restoring one person, one vote democracy. In Georgia, a lawsuit brought by a coalition of grassroots organizations led by the NAACP and represented by the National Voting Rights Institute contends that wealth plays such great a role in deciding who gets elected that it violates the Equal Protection and First Amendment rights of lower-income voters and candidates. Known as Georgia State Conference of NAACP Branches v. Massey, the lawsuit seeks a federal judge’s order mandating the creation of publicly financed campaigns for state office.

Explaining the organization’s role in this case, the NAACP’s Georgia president, Walter Butler said: “Thirty years ago, we won the fight to bring down the poll tax. The campaign finance system in Georgia today is the newest voting rights barrier, preventing ordinary citizens from equal participation in the election process.”

Like the unlawful white primaries of the past, today’s wealth primary prevents participation of the 99.75 percent of people who don’t contribute more than $200 to campaigns. The system violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection for all in the political process and undermines the constitutional right to an equal and meaningful vote.

One plaintiff in the Massey lawsuit is John White, a seventeen-year veteran of the Georgia House, who in the 1996 state senate elections, was outspent by his opponent seventeen times over (White’s campaign budget: $16,000; his opponent’s: $270,000). White lost, and he believes lack of money was the reason.

“It used to be, you couldn’t vote if you couldn’t pay the poll tax,” John White said. “Now you can’t be a senator if you can’t raise $200,000.” White’s contentions were bolstered by the results of a study which found that is money a determining factor in winning Georgia state senate elections. Analyzing all contestants for senate seats in the Georgia state senate from 1992 through 1996, the report, sponsored by a coalition of Georgia grassroots organizations, concludes that money was one of the strongest indicators of success, with the higher-spending candidate winning 83 percent of the time. The study found that incumbents who outspent their rivals in the last three election cycles prevailed 95 percent of the time.

“Unless the campaign finance laws are changed to make the field equitable, unless there are caps for spending, it will continue to be the wealthy who will have a voice and access to the people, and consequently, the power,” said James Gibson, who canvassed rural Calhoun County in John White’s campaign. “In the ’96 election I saw the tremendous disadvantage that John White had, not having the money to reach the people the way his opponent did, with television advertisements. I knew White could better represent the peoples’ interests, but he couldn’t get to them the way his wealthy opponent could. He could not reach the people.”

Nelson Rivers, director of the Southern regional office of the NAACP, describes the NAACP’s investment in changing the campaign finance system: “It’s a natural extension of our historic battle against injustice and exclusion at the ballot box. Money has become a barrier to equal access and participation in the process, and if it is not addressed it will continue to mean diminished democratic opportunity for African Americans and other people of color. And despite what appears to be just the opposite thinking, America still has not declared that political participation is only for those who have money. It doesn’t say that in the Constitution.”

Addressing the relevance of lawsuits like Massey to the African-American community, Rivers said: “We’re impacted negatively in a disproportionate way. Since African Americans have decidedly less income, less disposable money than other people in the country, we’re at a disadvantage when money is the deciding factor in whether you can participate.

“Sometimes the whole issue of money is nothing but a subterfuge to get to other things,” Rivers continued. “The messages that are there on the airwaves and in campaign propaganda, those messages cost money, and a lot of those messages are negative and foster negative stereotypes. A lot of code words are used. Some of the same strategies that were used by whoever would say the n-word the loudest now is more sophisticated and cleaned up, but the outcome is still the same. So we have to fight that battle to make sure that your income does not predict or control your outcome as a candidate.”

James Gibson sees Georgia’s lawsuit as the beginning of a larger struggle. “All of us have the opportunity to affect change, to make a difference. It doesn’t matter whether it’s on the local, state or national level. As American citizens we have the opportunity, responsibility, and the right to go out there and do whatever we can to make things better for this generation and the next generation. What happened twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago will not be able to occur again. It’s about making America the best for everybody.”

---

Page 15

From the NAACP’s perspective, says Rivers: “This case is about the future. It means that young people will have the chance to participate in the process of deciding who will make decisions that affect their lives. Because the people who control the politics control the policies that affect young folk-everything from whether there will be a college education available to them, whether there will be a chance to get a job, to go into business. Income ought not to determine the outcome politically. And right now that’s what happens in America. There’s a lot of pious platitudes about ‘anyone can participate.’ But over and over again we see that money is the big factor. And what that leaves us with is the Will Rogers comment about ‘the best Congress money can buy.’ Well in Georgia we’ve got the best legislature that money can buy, and that’s not the best legislature for serving the people. This is a long-term project. But our struggle for justice is long-term.”

Like his fellow Georgia plaintiffs, James Gibson is determined that the Massey case will help change the system. He’s the persevering type: Gibson stays active in politics, even though he’s been confined to a wheelchair since a farm accident in 1962. He has always lived in the rural community of Edison (population: 1,150), but there’s nothing provincial about his world view: “This case is important to young people all over the country, because if they don’t get involved, then the funding by Congress, by state legislatures, by city and county governments, that money won’t be there to provide for their education, for health care, or for roads, food stamps-the whole nine yards. It’s all connected to who makes those decisions in Congress and in state legislatures. We have to address these issues, because they will affect every single aspect of our lives from the time we’re born to the time we die, really and truly.”

Sharon Basco is communications director at the National Voting Rights Institute, and can be reached at: 294 Washington Street, Suite 713, Boston, MA 02108; Phone (617)368-9100;Fax(617)368-9101;Email: nvri@world.std.com.

Getting Money Out of Politics

Interviewed by Ellen Spears and Winnett Hagens

Vol. 20, No. 3, 1998 pp. 16-20

Veteran activsts in Alabama, North Carolina, and Louisiana who have been involved in local and state campaigns speak out about efforts to remove the corrupting influence of money in politics.

Gwen Patton ran for the U.S. Senate in 1992 as an independent and is now the archivist for Institutional Records and Special Collections of Montgomery’s Pioneer Voting Rights Activists located at Trenholm State Technical College in Montgomery, Alabama.

Pete MacDowell is executive director of Democracy south in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Stephanie Anthony, an organizer and mother of four children, is the founder and executive director of the Louisiana Democracy Project in Baton Rouge. She ran for city council in 1992.

State Contacts for Clean Money, Clean Elections Campaigns

Staff

Vol. 20, No. 3, 1998 p. 21

Alabama
• Greater Birmingham Ministries
  Scott Douglas
  2304 12th Avenue North
  Birmingham, AL 35234
  Phone 205-326-6821; Fax 205-252-8458
  Email gbmdouglas@aol.com
  
• Alabama Arise Stan Johnson
  P.O. Box 846
  Huntsville, AL 35804
  Phone 205-880-6254; Fax 205-880-2781
  Email stanjj@mindspring.com
  
  
  Florida
  • Florida Sierra Club Susie Caplowe
    P.O. Box 1201
    Tallahassee, FL 32302
    Phone 850-385-6160; Fax 850-385-6536
    Email susie.caplowe@sierraclub.org
    
  • Florida Consumer Action Network Dan Hendrickson
    3208 Langley Circle
    Tallahassee, FL 32312
    Phone (850)385-6160; Fax (850)385-6536
    Email dansue@earthink.net
    
  • Florida Common Cause Sally Spencer
    1811 Ivan Drive
    Tallahassee, FL 32303
    Phone 904-222-3883; Fax 904-222-3906
    Email ccfl@freenet.tlh.fl.us
    
    
    Georgia
    • Project South Abbey Illenberger, Jerome Scott
      9 Gammon Ave. SE
      Atlanta, GA 30315
      Phone 404-622-7778; Fax 404-622-7992
      Email projectsouth@igc.apc.org
      
    • Georgia Rural-Urban Summit Randall Merritt
      340 King Avenue
      Athens, GA 30606
      Phone 706-546-1733; Fax 706-546-4073
      Email 104357.2171@compuserve.com
      
      
      Kentucky
      • Kentuckians for the Commonwealth Lisa Osanka
        2210 Dundee Road #203
        Louisville, KY 40205
        Phone 502-473-0464; Fax 606-878-7514
        Email losana@kih.net
        
        
        Louisiana
        • Louisiana Democracy Project Stephanie Anthony
          200 Lafayette Street., Suite 613
          Baton Rouge, LA 70801
          Phone 504-338-9393; Fax 504-338-9188
          Email ENDLEEd@aol.com
          
        • EPAC Darryl Malek-Wiley
          618 Adams Street
          New Orleans, LA 70118-3929
          Phone 504-865-8708; Fax 504-865-8708
          Email dmw@bellsouth.net
          
          
          North Carolina
          • Democracy South Stan Goff, Pete MacDowell
            605 A NC Highway 54 West
            Chapel Hill, NC 27516
            Phone 919-967-9942; Fax 919-967-7595
            Email petemacdowell@all4demcracy.org
            
          • Democracy South Robert Hall
            5706 Old Stoney Way
            Durham, NC 27705
            Phone 919-489-1931; Fax 919-489-6597
            Email sprc@mindspring.com
            
          • Democracy South Lisa Hamill
            P.O. Box 392
            Carrboro, NC 27510
            Phone 919-967-9942
            Email lhamill@juno.com
            
          • North Carolina Alliance for Democracy Warren Murphy, Len Stanley
            605A Highway 54 West
            Chapel Hill, NC 27516
            Phone 919-967-9942; Fax 919-967-9765
            Email lenstanley@4democracy.org
            
            
            South Carolina
            • South Carolina Progressive Network Brett Bursey
              P.O. Box 8325
              Columbia, SC 29202
              Phone 803-808-3384; Fax 803-808-3781
              Email scpoint@mindspring.com
              
              
              Tennessee
              • Tennessee Citizen Action Brian McGuire
                2012 21st Avenue, South
                Nashville, TN 37212
                Phone 615-297-2494; Fax 615-297-8372
                Email tnca@mindspring.com
                
                
                West Virginia
                • Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition Janet Fout
                  1101 Sixth Avenue, Suite 222
                  Huntington, WV 25701
                  Phone 304-522-0246; Fax 304-523-6051
                  Email jfout@eve.net
                  
                • Southern Appalachian Labor School Gary Zuckett
                  P.O. Box 258
                  Page, WV 25152
                  Phone 304-659-3193; Fax 304-659-3178
                  Email gzucketto@wnpb.wvnet.edu
                  
                  
                  
                  

                
                
                
                

                
                
                

              
              
              

            
            
            

          
          
          
          

          
          
          
          

          
          
          
          

          
          
          

        
        
        
        

        
        
        

      
      
      

    
    
    
    

    
    
    

  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  

Monopoly Politics, Southern-Style

By Rob Richie

Vol. 20, No. 3, 1998 pp. 23-24

Just who decides legislative elections in the United States? The voters cast ballots, but most Americans, most of the time, experience “no choice” legislative elections. They live in political monopolies that essentially are one-party fiefdoms created in redistricting to produce exactly such lopsided results. With voter turnout shrinking to one of the world’s lowest levels-a 1997 study ranked the United States 103rd in voter turnout among 131 democracies in national elections since World War II-and with alienation from the political process increasing rapidly, particularly among the young, it is high time to consider changing the rules that create and sustain these political monopolies.

Although the South’s politics have undergone dramatic changes in recent decades, the region still provides the nation’s most damning evidence of non-competitive elections and their impact on voter turnout. In 1996, every state in the region ranked among the bottom twenty in voter turnout in U.S. House elections. Of the Southern states, only Arkansas finished among the top twenty in competitive congressional House races (as measured by average victory margins). Six of the seven Southern states with partisan state legislative elections finished among the bottom ten states in the uncontested races, with more than half of races having only one major party candidate.

Turnout and competitiveness are even lower in mid-term elections. In 1994, eight Southern states were among the nine lowest in the nation in voter turnout. No Southern state that year had more than 55 percent of its state legislative seats contested by both major parties, with four states having more than three in five state legislative races won without contest. Turnout in 1998 promises to be even worse; nearly half of the region’s U.S. House races will be uncontested.

The current U.S. election system often produces a legislature with the distortions of a funhouse mirror, poorly reflecting the full spectrum of voters’ opinions and interests. Only 1 percent of the U.S. Senate is black or Latino despite those groups making up more than 25 percent of the nation’s population. In the Deep South, running from South Carolina to Louisiana, Republican candidates won nearly 70 percent of House seats with only 55 percent of votes. Women hold only one of these 36 seats.

Non-competitive elections and distorted representation arise from the winner-take-all election system. Single-member district elections in majority black areas have been the route to fair representation for black voters throughout the South. Rather than returning to at-large systems-winner-take-all elections held in multi-seat districts usually exaggerate distorted representation and dilute black electoral opportunity-non-winner-take-all election systems should be given a serious look.

The principle behind these “proportional representation” (PR) systems is that any grouping of like-minded voters should win legislative seats in proportion to its share of the popular vote. Whereas the current winner-take-all principle awards 100 percent of the representation to a 50.1 percent majority, a PR system allows voters in a minority to win a share of representation. PR may be familiar to those who have closely followed presidential elections, as all Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses and many Republican primaries allocate convention seats by proportional representation.

To convert to a form of PR, five one-seat districts might be combined into a single five-seat district. A candidate could win with the strong support of 20 percent of voters in this district. A slate of candidates with the support of a narrow majority of voters would elect three of five seats.

Proportional systems are used in most mature democracies. Of the thirty-six major, full-fledged democracies around the world, only the United States and Canada do not use a PR system to elect at least one of their national legislatures.

There are both partisan and non-partisan forms of PR; more than 200

---

Page 24

localities in the United States in fact use one of three non-partisan systems: limited voting, cumulative voting and choice voting (e.g., single transferable vote). Some PR systems allow very small political forces to win seats, while others set higher thresholds that limit proportionality. Some PR systems eliminate all guaranteed representation of different geographic areas; others allow voters to balance geographic representation with representation of their other communities of interest.

Lowering the percentage of votes necessary to win representation may cause concern about representation of extremists. The experience of PR around the world, however, suggests ways to find reasonable compromises between extremely low thresholds of representation (only one percent in Italy and Israel before those nations raised their thresholds this decade) and the winner-take-all threshold of 50 percent. More fundamentally, for every American voter who wants to elect an extremist, there are probably five to ten voters currently denied an opportunity to elect a more centrist representative because they live in a non-competitive district.

South Africa’s first all-race elections in 1994 are revealing. Despite that nation’s bitter racial history and a low threshold in which 1/400th of voters could elect their own representative, the two leading parties won more than 80 percent of the votes with multi-racial candidate slates and messages of inclusion. Radical parties appealing only to blacks or to whites won fewer than 5 percent of votes and just a handful of seats.

Closer to home, Illinois’ experience with cumulative voting for state legislative elections from 1870 to 1980 is reassuring: as the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1995 in calling for cumulative voting’s restoration, “[Cumulative voting] produced some of the best and brightest in Illinois politics.”

Given a likely record-low voter turnout in 1998 and a Congress that increasingly puts short-term political considerations ahead of long-term policy interests, it is encouraging to see signs of serious interest in proportional representation. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has introduced legislation to give states the option to use PR systems for House elections. The Southern Regional Council, Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy, the Center for Voting and Democracy (CVD) are working together to promote education about PR systems. Law review articles are examining PR systems as a potential remedy in voting rights cases.

For more information on these developments and a special report Electing the People’s House: 1998, see the Center for Voting and Democracy web site (http://www.fairvote.org) or contact CVD at: (202) 828-3062.

Rob Richie is executive director of The Center for Voting and Democracy, based in Washington, D.C.

Sampling the 2000 Census

By Sarah E. Torian

Vol. 20, No. 3, 1998 pp. 24-25

In the upcoming months the Supreme Court will be making an important decision that will affect what has been termed the “most important civil rights issue for the remainder of the 105th Congress.” The issue is the Decennial Census and whether or not scientific sampling methods will be used to improve the accuracy of this population count in the year 2000.

The Decennial Census, a vital part of a fair and functioning democracy, is becoming less effective. For the first time since the 1940 census, the 1990 Census was less accurate than its predecessor. The 1990 net undercount or percentage of people who are missed by the Census count, was 50 percent greater than its 1980 counterpart. According to the Census Bureau, the 1990 Census missed 8.4 million people and double-counted 4.4 million, resulting in an undercount of 4 million. Of that 4 million, over 1.5 million (39 percent) were in the eleven Southern states.

Even more disturbing is the “differential undercount,” the difference between the undercount of whites and the undercount of ethnic minority groups. The “differential undercount” for the 1990 Census was the highest ever recorded since the Census Bureau began conducting post-Census evaluations in 1940. Most of those overlooked in the Census are children, people of color, and the rural and urban poor. Children under the age of 18, a group that represents 26 percent of the total national population, accounted for an incredible 52 percent of the undercount.

Considering the influence of the Census, these statistics are quite disturbing. The Census figures are used to allocate seats in the House of Representatives, to distribute tens of billions of dollars annually in federal, state and local program funds, to apportion electoral college votes, and to carry out congressional, state, and local redistricting, among other things. Since poor, minority, and central city populations and children, those most frequently undercounted, are also communities that are often most in need of social services and economic development programs and are frequently poorly represented as a constituency, it becomes increasingly important to ensure as fair and accurate a count as possible. Otherwise, these groups are denied important services and are denied their right to fair and equal representation.

Factors such as poverty, illiteracy, lack of education, fear or mistrust of government, language barriers, geography, and changing family structure all contribute to these lower rates of coverage.

In an effort to address the limitations of present enumerations methods, the Census Bureau, with the help of

---

Page 25

National Academy of Sciences, General Accounting Office and Commerce Department’s Office of Inspector General panels, produced “The Plan for Census 2000.” This plan combines a more aggressive direct enumeration effort, including several mailings to every household and multiple response options, with modern scientific sampling techniques to complete the count of the final non-responding households.

This plan is currently under attack by a Republican-led House that wants scientific sampling methods banned from use in collecting Census data and filed a lawsuit, arguing that the use of sampling methods would violate federal law. The Clinton administration, which supports the use of scientific sampling, is challenging a three-judge federal panel’s August 25 decision in that case that invalidated the Census Bureau’s plan without ruling on the constitutionality of sampling.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments November 30 and will likely decide by March whether scientific sampling can be used in the 2000 Census. A decision by March is vital. Since the lower court’s ruling, administration officials have been preparing for the upcoming Census on a “dual track.” one using scientific sampling and the other using only direct headcount methods. lawyers for both the House and the administration said, “If the current uncertainty continues beyond March 1999 [the] ability to conduct the most accurate census possible will be seriously threatened.”

For more information on scientific sampling in the 2000 Census, visit http://www.census2000.org and http://198.5.6.212/lcef/census2000

Sarah E. Torian is program assistant in communications at the Southern Regional Council