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The Chilton County Experience

Minority voters have elected candidates of choice using cumulative voting on a number of occasions. Further illustration is provided by the November 1992 election for the seven seats on the Chilton County Commission in Alabama.
Chilton County adopted cumulative voting in 1988 as part of the settlement of a vote dilution lawsuit brought against its previous election system. According to the 1990 Census, African Americans constitute only 9.9% of the county's voting age population. No African American had been elected to the county commission this century until the first cumulative voting election, held in 1988. That commissioner, Bobby Agee, was reelected the second cumulative voting election in 1992.
An exit poll taken during the November 1992 general election in Chilton County reveals that Agee's reelection was a function of African American voters taking advantage of their option to cumulate votes on his behalf. Given the small percentage of African Americans in the county, the exit poll deliberately over-sampled African American voters. A total of 702 voters, of whom 142 (20.3%) were African American, reported how they cast their votes in this commission election.
With the exception of Agee, the percentage of vote received by each of the candidates in the poll was within two percentage points of the percentage they received in the actual vote. Agee did better in the poll than in the actual count; whereas he finished second among the fourteen candidates in the actual vote, with 9.69% of the votes cast, he finished first in the exit poll with 15.73%. This no doubt reflects the over-sampling of African American voters. If the vote is adjusted to reflect the over-sampling, Agee's percentage drops to 10.47%, very close to his actual percentage.
Despite being one of the seven Democratic candidates in the general election, Agee received very little support from the county's non-African American voters. Among the non-African American voters in the exit poll (97.0% of whom identified themselves as white), Agee finished twelfth -- ahead of the only other African American candidate, also a Democratic nominee, and one white Republican candidate. Only 13.4% of these voters cast even a single vote for Agee.
Agee was by far the choice of the African American voters, however. He received a vote from 67.1% of the African Americans who reported their vote in the exit poll, and 85.4% of these voters said they cast all seven of their votes for him. On average Agee received 6.28 votes from each of his African American supporters. (The other African American candidate received at least one vote from 32.9% of the African American voters, and 78.7% of these voters cast all seven of their votes for the candidate.) Agee was clearly the most preferred candidate among the African American voters, and the ability to express the intensity of their preference was critical to his electoral success.
The Chilton County experience with cumulative voting is not unique. African American voters in other settings have also been able to elect candidates of their choice through this system, as have Hispanic and Native American voters. As these experiences demonstrate, the representation of politically cohesive minority groups do not have to be dependent on where the group's voters happen to live.
A new shape threshold for election districts, if that is what Shaw requires, should not be allowed to become a convenient excuse for systematically diluting the votes of minority voters. If majority minority districts that are sufficiently attractive to the courts cannot be created, then other types of democratic election systems that do not have dilutive consequences, like cumulative voting, should be adopted.

Jason F. Kirksey is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of New Orleans, where voting rights expert Richard L. Engstrom is a research professor. Edward Still is a civil rights attorney in Birmingham, Alabama. This article first appeared in the Voting Rights Review of the Southern Regional Council, which can be contacted at: 134 Peachtree Street, Suite 1900, Atlanta, GA 30303.
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