Formalized by the Neill Primary Act in 1917, the county-unit system had operated informally in Georgia since 1898 as the method for primary election of statewide office holders. Employing an Electoral College style, the system bolstered the influence of small, rural counties at the expense of more populous urban areas.
Left: Roy V. Harris, a longtime "kingmaker" was a master of the white-only, rural-dominated state politics held up by the County Unit System. A popular saying among Georgians in the 1940s: "What do you need to be elected Governor of Georgia? $50,000 and Roy Harris." Photograph from Ed Friend Visual Materials Collection , Russell Library. Each of the 159 counties in the state was classified as urban, town, or rural. Urban counties received six votes each, town counties four, and rural counties two, with a winner-take-all system for the candidate victorious by popular vote within the county. With 410 votes up for grabs statewide, a candidate needed 206 to claim the nomination. The disproportionate distribution of unit votes to population size encouraged heavy campaigning in the 121 rural counties.
Citizens launched unsuccessful constitutional challenges to the system in the 1940s and 1950s, but the courts were reluctant to review apportionment within states. In Baker v. Carr (1962) the Supreme Court found that the county-unit system violated the constitutional principle of “one man, one vote.” A similar case in Georgia, Gray v. Sanders (1962), pushed the U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia to issue an injunction against the system just months before the gubernatorial primary. As a result Carl Sanders, a more liberal urban candidate, triumphed in the first statewide popular vote in nearly fifty years.
Traces of the county unit system can be found in many of the collections at the Russell Library. A quick keyword search of the collections database results in several hits, many of which touch on public efforts to get rid of the system in the early 1950s.
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