CNN - Georgia run off system is racist

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Another year, another Georgia Senate race that’s headed to a runoff election.

Neither Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock nor his Republican challenger Herschel Walker, a former football star, crossed the 50% threshold necessary to win outright on Tuesday. In consequence, they must battle at the polls on December 6.

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But like last year’s races, the upcoming contest has sparked conversations about the troubling history of the runoff system, which some states began using in the final decades of the 19th century to quash Black political power.

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In particular, he criticized SB 202, the wide-ranging elections law Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed last year, after Democrats, propelled by Black voters, triumphed in both of the state’s US Senate runoff elections.

“(Georgia Republicans) shrunk the time for runoff campaigns (from nine weeks to four weeks). And voter registration for the runoff ended the day before the election,” Griggs explained. “These are attempts to condense the amount of time people have to vote, and thwart mobilization, especially mobilization of African American voters.”

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In several Southern states after the end of slavery and after Black men were allowed to vote, Black people were a majority of the electorate. There were some states where Black people were 40% or so of the electorate.

So, the White people who were in control of the legislatures used the runoff to ensure that if there were multiple candidates in the first election and a Black person ran first or even second, the White vote could consolidate in the runoff and defeat that Black candidate.

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The runoff election was maintained into the 20th century in the one-party South as a device to ensure that even if only White people were voting, the White candidate who took office as governor or whatever the office was would’ve gotten a majority of the White vote.

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I think that there’s no reason for the runoff. It serves no purpose. It’s a vestige. It should simply be discarded, and we should run plurality elections.

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