The Fayette County Commission has selected a small but prominent Atlanta law firm with litigation experience on both sides of the federal Voting Rights Act to represent the county in the district voting lawsuit filed by the Fayette County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
In 2010, three Strickland Brockington Lewis LLP attorneys represented the state of Georgia in Voting Rights Act pre-clearance action. And a decade before, in the 2000 redistricting, the firm represented four minority citizens in a case that was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and then remanded to U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The firm, headquartered in midtown Atlanta, has five attorneys listed on its roster, according to SuperLawyers.com, one of whom is the general counsel to the Georgia Republican Party and another who is listed as a “major contributor” to the GOP.
The NAACP on Aug 9 filed a complaint in federal court seeking to dump the at-large method of electing representatives to the Fayette County Board of Commissioners and the Fayette County Board of Education.
In its place, the NAACP wants to institute a district voting system in which voters will only be able to vote to fill one of the seats on each board, based on which geographic district the voter lives in.
Currently, both boards are elected on an at-large basis, which allows every voter in the county to vote on all five seats for the board of education and county commission.
In the lawsuit, the NAACP and 11 Fayette residents claim the current at-large system has kept them from being able to “elect candidates of their choice” to both governing bodies. The complaint also claims that “non-black members of the electorate have consistently voted as a bloc so as to defeat every black-preferred candidate for the board of commissioners or board of education.”
The lawsuit notes that no black person has ever been elected to the board of education or the county commission.
The only black person ever elected to office in Fayette County history was Magistrate Judge Charles Floyd, the lawsuit notes. Floyd won several elections to the post before his unexpected death last year.
The county’s answer to the lawsuit is required in U.S. District Court in Newnan by Oct. 10, but that is only the first step in the federal legal process.
The county’s law firm in the meantime is investigating the complaint and reporting progress to the county commission, according to Fayette County’s staff attorney, Scott Bennett.
In the federal complaint, a good bit of attention is paid to the 2006 special election for one of the seats on the county commission. In that election Robert Horgan, a white candidate, won a five-way race for a vacant seat on the Fayette County Board of Commissioners against four other black candidates. That race included two black Democratic candidates, Wendi Felton and Charles Rousseau, along with black Republican candidates Emory Wilkerson and Malcolm Hughes.
The suit does not, however, detail that while 51.7 percent of the voters chose Horgan, the remaining vote was split amongst the four black candidates, with Wilkerson leading the others with 29.05 percent of the vote. Nor does it provide a racial breakdown of how many voters supported which candidate.
The suit also cites an Atlanta newspaper article comment as evidence that Horgan was using racially-loaded language in his campaign. The suit specifically referenced a quote from Horgan in which he said he was running for office “to maintain and preserve the heritage we have in our county.”
The suit also focuses on the 2010 defeat of Laura Burgess, a black college professor who ran as a Democrat for an open seat on the Fayette County Board of Education against Republican challenger Sam Tolbert, a retired college professor. The suit claims that Burgess “received near unanimous support from black voters (99 percent) but less than 20 percent of white votes.”
Burgess only got 31.5 percent of the vote countywide, according to county election results.
While the suit does not touch on the subject, Burgess’ campaign was notable because she never responded to a list of questions submitted to all candidates by The Citizen newspaper, the results of which were subsequently published. Tolbert did respond to The Citizen’s questions, and his answers were published in the paper.
Also not mentioned in the suit, Burgess also declined to return a number of phone calls for comment placed by The Citizen during the campaign, although she spoke with a reporter once in May soon after she qualified.
The board of education and county commission have similar systems for determining the outcome of an election. There are slight differences, however.
The commission consists of three posts limited to three different geographic districts in the county. For those three posts, all candidates for office must live in one of those districts. The remaining two commission posts are “at-large” districts, meaning that there is no requirement for the candidate to live in a specific district.
In any case, all Fayette County voters are allowed to vote on all county commission candidates.
The board of education consists of five posts limited to five different geographic districts in the county, but just like the county commission, all BoE posts can be voted on by all Fayette County voters, regardless of which BoE district they live in.
According to the lawsuit, plaintiff Alice Jones told the commissioners at a 2007 meeting that her “majority black neighborhood had been neglected for road and street improvements, green space acquisition, recreational space and other critical services.”
The suit also claims that Jones complained to the commission over several meetings that the county had failed to properly maintain a park in her neighborhood. The suit does not specifically identify that park, nor does it explain whether the park is owned by the county or the subdivision.
