Although the rural counties accounted for only 32 percent of the state population by that year, they controlled 59 percent of the total unit vote.

In many elections, candidates who received the majority of popular votes were defeated by candidates who carried the most county unit votes.Ĭensus data from 1960 illustrate the inequities of the county unit system. If a candidate won a plurality of the popular vote in a county, then he received the entire unit vote from that county, meaning that the votes of rural counties could easily equal, and effectively negate, the votes of urban counties. With a statewide total of 410 unit votes, a candidate needed 206 to win the party’s nomination, despite the outcome of the popular vote. In the Democratic primary, candidates concerned themselves more with winning counties than with winning the popular vote and thus spent far more time campaigning in rural areas and small towns than in the state’s major cities. Given that Georgia voters were almost entirely Democratic during the first half of the twentieth century, elections were more often decided at the primary stage than in the general election. The urban counties received six unit votes each, the town counties received four unit votes each, and the rural counties received two unit votes each. Based upon this classification, each county received unit votes in statewide primaries. Urban counties were the 8 most populous town counties were the next 30 in population size and rural counties constituted the remaining 121. All 159 counties were classified according to population into one of three categories: urban, town, and rural.

In effect, the system of allotting votes by county, with little regard for population differences, allowed rural counties to control Georgia elections by minimizing the impact of the growing urban centers, particularly Atlanta.

Most populous counties in us