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Frequently Asked Questions in the Glades County Elections Case
Why is the ACLU pursuing a project exclusively about voting rights?
In 1965, Congress passed The Voting Rights Act, one of the most effective civil rights laws ever enacted. The Act immediately outlawed the worst Jim Crow laws in the South, such as literacy tests and other devices that kept black citizens out of the voting booth. Then gradually, through court decisions and Congressional amendments, more subtle schemes to disenfranchise minorities fell by the wayside. In Mississippi, for example, black registration rose from 6.7 percent in 1964 to 70.8 percent in 1986. Today, nearly 5,000 African Americans hold elective office across the South.
In 1966 the American Civil Liberties Union established its Southern Regional Office in Atlanta to conduct its Voting Rights Project. The first director of the office, Charles Morgan, Jr., was one of the lawyers who handled Reynolds v. Sims, the first case to require state legislatures to apply a one-person, one-vote standard. The Voting Rights Project attorneys have brought literally hundreds of lawsuits challenging barriers to voter registration, ballot access and election structures that dilute minority voting strength. Most of its litigation has been in the states of the old Confederacy and has greatly contributed to the number of minority office holders. Litigation has since expanded to represent the claims of language and ethnic minorities and Native Americans in other parts of the country.
In 1993, the tide shifted ominously when the Supreme Court delivered its decision in Shaw v. Reno and struck down a majority minority voting district in North Carolina as unconstitutional. Since Shaw, the Court has continued to chip away at voting rights. Two years later, in Miller v. Johnson, the Court went far beyond what it had said in Shaw and held that a district could be challenged, regardless of its shape, if race was the predominant factor in the redistricting process and if the jurisdiction subordinated its traditional districting principles to race. Since then, Shaw and Miller have spawned a host of lawsuits challenging majority minority districts.
The Voting Rights Project has sought to represent citizen interveners in as many of the Shaw/Miller challenges as its resources have permitted. As the hard won gains of African-Americans and other minorities are in danger of being extinguished, protecting voting rights is more important than ever. Southern states cannot be counted on vigorously to defend the Voting Rights Act, and intervention is crucial.
If each individual African-American vote in Glades County counts as much as each white vote, how is that unfair?
The equity of an at-large election system depends on the way it operates. In locales with populations that are not racially polarized, such a system would not necessarily be discriminatory. However, in a county such as Glades in which white and black voters tend to vote differently, the effect of the system is that minority votes are diluted to the extent that it would be impossible to elect a candidate of their choice if the white majority opposed it - even to represent a predominantly black district. In the current majority-takes-all system, there is no provision for limited or cumulative voting or other non-majoritarian procedures. Plaintiff Billie Thompson's own campaign demonstrated the result - minority voters are now so removed from the process that for the most part they don't even run for office as she did. It takes money and energy to run a campaign, and candidates are hesitant to put forth personal and financial resources if election barriers drastically reduce their chances of winning.
Is this the first case of its kind in Florida?
No. Both the state of Florida and Glades County have a history of discrimination against African-Americans, including discrimination against African-Americans attempting to exercise their right to vote. There have been similar lawsuits in Hendry County, which borders Glades, as well as in Liberty County, City of Cocoa, Dade County, City of Ft. Pierce and DeSoto County, to name a few. The Hendry case is a good example of the success of eliminating at-large elections: the county responded to the suit by implementing a plan including five single-member districts; as a result, both the Commission and School Board have had consistent African-American representation since.
The state of Florida used to have single-member districts for both its school board and county commissions when it still ran all-white primaries, but the white primary was found unconstitutional by the State supreme court in 1945. It was in the very next legislative session, 1947, that the state changed the way school boards are elected from single-member to an at-large electoral system. Several courts have found that deliberate restructuring to be intentionally discriminatory.
