Georgia runoff elections designed to ‘keep Black candidates out of office,’ claims MSNBC

A segment on MSNBC’s "Velshi" discussed the alleged "deeply racist origins" of Georgia’s runoff elections, which were created to "keep Black candidates out of office."

MSNBC News correspondent Priscilla Thompson presented the report during Saturday's episode of the show, speaking to historians claiming that enshrining runoff elections into Georgia law was a way for White candidates to consolidate their voter bases and more easily defeat Black candidates in major state elections.

Though both candidates in the latest Georgia runoff, the tight U.S. Senate race between Republican Herschel Walker and his opponent Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., are Black, an historian noted that no Black candidate has been elected to a state executive office in Georgia history, supposedly a testament to the electoral system's racist origin. 

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Introducing the story, host Ali Velshi stated, "But while we now have two Black candidates competing in this race, runoff elections in general have deeply racist origins and were designed to keep Black candidates out of office. NBC News correspondent Priscilla Thompson digs into that fraught history."

Setting the historical backdrop, Thompson narrated, "But some experts say, that wasn’t the original intent of the law." The segment cut to historian and Southern Methodist University professor Cal Jillson, who claimed, "Back to the Civil War, Blacks were a major part of the southern electorate. Once reconstruction and military occupation of the south ended, White settlers spent the rest of the 19th century squeezing Blacks out of the electorate."

Thompson continued, explaining that the initial way White southerners "disenfranchised" Black voters was by employing a "county unit system to give less populated but primarily White rural parts of the state more political power."

Though she recounted how the Supreme Court ruled that the "system violated the equal protection clause of The Constitution."

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The segment turned back to Jillson, who continued, "At that point many southern states, including Georgia, looked for other devices and the runoff system was one of those devices."

Thompson then recalled the man who came up with the runoff system: "Enter Denmark Groover. Groover a member of Georgia’s House of Representatives fell out of power, and he blamed ‘negro bloc voting’ for his loss."

The reporter noted that Groover was a "vocal segregationist" who was "determined to stop Black Georgians growing political power." She presented a quote Groover uttered later in life, in which he said, "If you want to establish if I was racially prejudiced, I was. If you want to establish that some of my political activity was racially motivated, it was."

The report continued, stating that in 1963, "one year after the Supreme Court struck down the county unit system, Groover, now back in office, proposed a new election system: the runoff."

Jillson explained the thinking, saying, "Groover explicitly talked about how even if the White vote were divided in the first election and a Black made the runoff, Whites could come together as a majority to win in the runoff."

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Thompson then said, "In 1964, the runoff system became law in Georgia." 

Jillson noted the law’s effects on Georgia election history, stating, "No Blacks have been elected to the senior offices in Georgia – meaning governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state – ever. So apparently it worked."