For the first six decades of Willie Gill's life, the winding dirt road next to his house in Chilton County, Alabama, was a nuisance. If trucks weren't churning its surface into clouds of red dust, rains were turning it into a swamp. Gill, who is black, never really expected the all-white county commission to do much about it. "But Mr. Agee, he come and put in a paved road just about last year," Gill reports. "I'm glad to have it."
Gill is no fire-breathing radical. Nor is Bobby Agee, a 43-year-old funeral director who six years ago became the county's first black commissioner since Reconstruction. Yet Gill's road would not have been paved had he and other Chilton County blacks not voted for Agee seven times apiece -- legally. It was an act that, radical or not, put them in the vanguard of a ballot-casting experiment called cumulative voting, one of a brace of methods hailed by some as the future of suffrage but labeled antidemocratic by no less an authority than Bill Clinton.
Traditionally Americans are uneager to tinker under the hood of the voting machine. There is one major recent exception, however: minority voting rights. In 1982, when it had long been obvious that white majorities throughout the country were -- legally -- freezing black minorities out of any office whatsoever, Congress revised the Voting Rights Act. Combined with related court cases, the revision compels areas with histories of discrimination to create voting districts where minorities can get elected. Almost invariably this was read as a call to carve out geographic districts where blacks, Hispanics or Native Americans were the majority.
The solution is imperfect. Some scholars object outright to any government engineering of racial advantage. Other critics note that whites in the newly created districts become a new voiceless minority. A third group grimaces at the gerrymanders spawned when districters create land bridges between geographically dispersed minority members. Nonetheless, the districts were generally accepted as a necessary evil. Their critics from the right risked portrayal as troglodytes. And when Lani Guinier, Clinton's ill-fated candidate for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, entered stage left, having penned articles suggesting some alternatives, the backpedaling President called them "antidemocratic" and "difficult to defend."
Within weeks of her nomination's withdrawal, however, Guinier found an unlikely ally. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor ruled that districts like North Carolina's serpentine 12th were "bizarre" and might be challenged as perpetuating "political apartheid." Many voting-rights champions, facing language that seemed to question their very enterprise, were stymied.
Not so Judge Joseph H. Young of Maryland. Ruling two weeks ago on a Voting Rights Act suit against Worcester County, Maryland, Young bade it change -- not by adding a black-majority enclave, but by adopting one of Guinier's reviled alternatives, cumulative voting. Meanwhile, the New York Times had published a speculative plan drafted by the Washington-based Center for Voting and Democracy explaining how North Carolina could erase its troublesome 12th * in favor of the same system. Suddenly one of Lani's Follies looked like it might be the wave of the future.
Gill is no fire-breathing radical. Nor is Bobby Agee, a 43-year-old funeral director who six years ago became the county's first black commissioner since Reconstruction. Yet Gill's road would not have been paved had he and other Chilton County blacks not voted for Agee seven times apiece -- legally. It was an act that, radical or not, put them in the vanguard of a ballot-casting experiment called cumulative voting, one of a brace of methods hailed by some as the future of suffrage but labeled antidemocratic by no less an authority than Bill Clinton.
Traditionally Americans are uneager to tinker under the hood of the voting machine. There is one major recent exception, however: minority voting rights. In 1982, when it had long been obvious that white majorities throughout the country were -- legally -- freezing black minorities out of any office whatsoever, Congress revised the Voting Rights Act. Combined with related court cases, the revision compels areas with histories of discrimination to create voting districts where minorities can get elected. Almost invariably this was read as a call to carve out geographic districts where blacks, Hispanics or Native Americans were the majority.
The solution is imperfect. Some scholars object outright to any government engineering of racial advantage. Other critics note that whites in the newly created districts become a new voiceless minority. A third group grimaces at the gerrymanders spawned when districters create land bridges between geographically dispersed minority members. Nonetheless, the districts were generally accepted as a necessary evil. Their critics from the right risked portrayal as troglodytes. And when Lani Guinier, Clinton's ill-fated candidate for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, entered stage left, having penned articles suggesting some alternatives, the backpedaling President called them "antidemocratic" and "difficult to defend."
Within weeks of her nomination's withdrawal, however, Guinier found an unlikely ally. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor ruled that districts like North Carolina's serpentine 12th were "bizarre" and might be challenged as perpetuating "political apartheid." Many voting-rights champions, facing language that seemed to question their very enterprise, were stymied.
Not so Judge Joseph H. Young of Maryland. Ruling two weeks ago on a Voting Rights Act suit against Worcester County, Maryland, Young bade it change -- not by adding a black-majority enclave, but by adopting one of Guinier's reviled alternatives, cumulative voting. Meanwhile, the New York Times had published a speculative plan drafted by the Washington-based Center for Voting and Democracy explaining how North Carolina could erase its troublesome 12th * in favor of the same system. Suddenly one of Lani's Follies looked like it might be the wave of the future.