In the last week of the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Justice filed two lawsuits aimed at forcing county officials in two Southern states to adopt new election systems that don’t disenfranchise Black voters.
In both cases, filed in Georgia and Tennessee, the DOJ alleges that county commission elections are structured to purposely prevent Black voters equal opportunity to elect their preferred candidates, violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits racial discrimination in elections.
The fate of the lawsuits is not clear, as the Justice Department last month ordered an immediate halt to all new civil rights cases or investigations.
The New York Times reported that memos sent by the DOJ’s new chief of staff Chad Mizelle indicate he wants the Civil Rights Division to refrain from initiating any new complaints until they are thoroughly reviewed by Trump appointees. The president has nominated Harmeet K. Dhillon, a conservative lawyer from California who supported Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, to run the division.
The lawsuit filed against Houston County, Georgia and the members of the Houston County Board of Commissioners on Jan. 16 contends that the current method of electing the five-member board dilutes the voting strength of Black citizens.
Currently, Houston County elects its county commission through at-large — or countywide — elections for staggered four-year terms. In a county that has a voting age population of 118,735 that is 58 percent White and 31 percent Black, this system favors white voters, who almost always vote as a bloc to defeat Black candidates, winning every open seat.
The result is that only one Black candidate has been elected to the Houston County Commission since Reconstruction began in 1865, the DOJ noted.
All Black candidates who ran for the commission between 1992 and 2022 were defeated, whether they ran as a Democrat, a Republicans or an Independent. Since 2002, at least 85 percent of Black voters have supported Black candidates in county commission elections, to no avail, because their votes were overwhelmed by white bloc voting.
The DOJ argues that if Houston County adopted a voting system organized by four or five geographic districts, the Black population of Houston County is sufficiently numerous and geographically compact to constitute a majority of voters in at least one such district.
The complaint says that a voting plan with one district drawn to include the majority-Black neighborhoods in northern and eastern Warner Robins would have yielded victories for Black-preferred candidates in recent board elections.
It also notes that Houston County has “a history of official discrimination that affected the right of Black residents to register, to vote, and to participate meaningfully in the democratic process,” citing a long period from Reconstruction to the 1940s when all-white county elected officials presided over discriminatory at-large municipal elections and segregated education.
“Racially-charged incident persist in Houston County,” the complaint says. “In the last year alone, students at a local high school were filmed mimicking the Ku Klux Klan, and the Houston County School District agreed to implement anti-discrimination training after acknowledging racial harassment and retaliation concerns arising from an athletic coach’s conduct.”
The DOJ asks a judge to find Houston County’s current election system in violation of the Voting Rights Act, to block the commission from using it in the future, and to order the county to devise and implement an election system that complies with the VRA.
The Houston County Board of Commissioners said in a statement that they will investigate the DOJ’s claims.
“Houston County will always follow the law,” the board said. “ At this time, Houston County is continuing to investigate the allegations made by DOJ and determine whether the evidence supports those allegations. We will also continue to speak with members of the community about DOJ’s claims. Importantly, the DOJ lawsuit does not contain any allegations of intentional racial discrimination in Houston County. … If we determine if we agree with DOJ regarding a possible violation of the Voting Rights Act after reviewing all of the documents and evidence, we will take appropriate action at that time.”
The case could provide a precedent for revamping elections in other Georgia counties where “electoral structures that impede minority representation persist,” noted the Brennan Center for Justice in a 2023 report on underrepresentation of minorities in local elections in Georgia. Nearly one in four counties in the state elects all its commissioners at large — that is, from the entire county rather than from single-member districts. At-large systems elect only half as many commissioners of color as would be predicted when compared with districted or mixed counties, normalizing for each county’s demographics, the report said.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit the DOJ filed against Fayette County, Tennessee, and Fayette County Board of County Commissioners on Jan. 15 alleges that the commission violated the VRA by adopting a redistricting plan in 2021 that contains no majority-Black voting age population districts, even though the county has a Black voting age population of 26 percent.
Since 2021, four Black candidates have lost in general elections, and a fifth Black incumbent, former commissioner Sylvester Logan, who had won election for many years, lost in a Republican primary to a white candidate after the district lines were redrawn, the complaint says. No Black candidate has been elected to the 19-member county commission under the 2021 voting plan.
The complaint, filed in U.S. District court for the Western District of Tennessee, notes that the board disregarded the advice and recommendations of its own redistricting committee (which included the mayor, the head of elections, a county commissioner, a school board member and a community member) which had endorsed four redistricting plans that included either two or three multiple majority-Black districts.
Instead, the board ignored those plans and, without discussion, adopted a different map with zero majority-minority districts.
The impact of the 2021 plan “has been to dilute Black voting strength in Fayette County by failing to provide Black voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of choice,” resulting in Fayette County having no Black county commissioners for the first time in over 20 years.
The DOJ said the actions the board took in 2021 are a continuation of the 2011 redistricting cycle, in which the county “successfully diminished Black political power.” The commission placed substantial Black populations into large rural districts where they had no hope of representation, given racially polarized voting and the fact that Black voters were outnumbered by white voters.
Fayette County’s total population was 41,990, of whom 27,558 were non-Hispanic white (66 percent) and 11,285 were Black (27 percent), according to the 2020 census. The county’s total voting-age population was 34,105, of whom 68 percent were non-Hispanic white and 26 percent were Black.
Notably, the number of elected Black commissioners went from four in 2010 to one in 2018 to zero under the 2021 plan.
The DOJ observed that Fayette County also has a long history of discrimination against Black voters. It filed two lawsuits in the 1950s and 1960s to protect the rights of Black voters in Fayette County, resulting in consent decrees. In U.S. v. Atkeison in 1960, the feds successfully challenged the retaliatory evictions of Black sharecroppers for exercising their right to vote.
In 2000, the Sixth Circuit affirmed that a House redistricting plan for six western counties in Tennessee, including Fayette County, violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the DOJ noted.
In Fayette County, no Black resident has ever held any countywide office, held a judgeship or represented the county as a state senator or state representative, at least since Reconstruction, the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit asks the court to declare the 2021 county commission plan in violation of the VRA, to stop the commission from using it in future elections, and to order Fayette County and the commission to devise and implement a permanent redistricting plan that complies with the Voting Rights Act.
“The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, and Black voters in Fayette County deserve the same opportunity as anyone else to elect leaders who represent their voices,” said acting U.S. Attorney Reagan Fondren for the Western District of Tennessee in a statement. “Our office is committed to ensuring fairness and equality in the electoral process.”
“This has needed to happen for a long, long time,” NAACP Tennessee Conference President Gloria Jean Sweet-Love told The Tennessee Lookout. A native of Fayette County, she said she has seen firsthand the county’s “history of trying to keep people of Black [descent] from voting.”
Tennessee Lookout reported Fayette County Mayor Rhea “Skip” Taylor confirmed the county is reviewing the DOJ lawsuit.
