Judge: Fayette elections unfair to minorities | www.myajc.com

Fayette county must end its 191-year-old, at large voting system in favor of district voting to give black residents a better chance of being elected to office, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten ordered Fayette to submit a plan to fix its racially-discriminatory voting structure by June 25. That plan must include the creation of a majority-black district, giving the county a realistic chance of electing its first county-level black official.

“The court is satisfied that, under the totality of the circumstances, [African-Americans in Fayette County are] denied

meaningful access to the political process on account of race or color,” Batten said in the 81-page decision.

The county commission hasn’t ruled out an appeal of Tuesday’s ruling. Chairman Steve Brown said the board plans to meet with its attorney on Thursday to decide what to do next.

“I’m wondering if this is going to lead us into a situation where we have to reissue the elections for the board of commissioners and school board,” Brown said. That would be a huge expense to the county not to mention all the people who ran.”

That’s not likely to happen, said Laughlin McDonald, director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project in Atlanta. McDonald is an attorney who has represented plaintiffs in hundreds of these types of cases.

“It doesn’t undo this past election,” McDonald said. “But they’ll have to implement a remedial plan to hold future elections.”

Brown said Batten conceded in his ruling that he would be hard-pressed to create a majority-minority district — a point the county’s own demographers said would be hard to achieve. At best, a district would yield 47 percent minority voting power, Brown said.

“He (Batten) literally admitted in the opinion that he could not come up with a majority-minority district. It was kind of odd because it’s very clear what you need to prove to show that you have any kind of discriminatory activity. That was never proven.”

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