Part IV: Gone with the Wind

In his forward to Great Georgians, former Gov. and Sen. Zell Miller writes:

"After the overthrow of the infamous county unit system and the reapportionment of the Georgia General Assembly on the basis of population came the integration of public facilities, and later the triple assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King. These upheavals resulted in Georgia's being forced into a modern society . . . ."

Miller also writes that also former Gov. and Sen. Herman Talmadge "lost in two efforts to write the county unit system into the State Constitution . . . ."

As hinted in Part I of this series of posts, come this special legislative session, so of us may be longing for the 'ole days and wishing things weren't quite so modern.

Maybe not the county unit system, but maybe something to each state have two senators. Regardless . . . .

In the days of the county unit system, as addressed in some of the former posts, each county was given a certain number of votes, and the candidate who received the highest number of votes in that county in a primary (and "the" primary) won all the units of the county.

There were 410 County unit votes. The eight most populous counties had six unit votes each (a total of 48), the next thirty most populous counties had four votes each (a total of 120), and the remaining 121 counties had two votes each (a total of 242).

The counties with two votes therefore had a majority of the votes. This allowed rural counties to control Georgia elections by minimizing the impact of the growing urban centers, particularly Atlanta. All 159 counties were classified according to population into one of three categories: urban, town, and rural. Urban counties were the 8 most populous; town counties were the next 30 in population size; and rural counties constituted the remaining 121. Based upon this classification, each county received unit votes in statewide primaries. 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.

As noted, this all changed in the early sixties, and indeed such days are forever Gone with the Wind.