DeJulio v. Georgia

• Decision Date: 26 January 2001
• Docket Number: No. CIV. A. 1:00CV273-TW.,CIV. A. 1:00CV273-TW.
• Citation: 127 F.Supp.2d 1274
• Parties: Tiberio P. DeJULIO and Eva C. Galambos, on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated, Plaintiffs, v. State of GEORGIA, et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of Georgia

127 F.Supp.2d 1274

Tiberio P. DeJULIO and Eva C. Galambos, on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated, Plaintiffs, v. State of GEORGIA, et al., Defendants.

No. CIV. A. 1:00CV273-TW.

United States District Court, N.D. Georgia, Atlanta Division.

January 26, 2001.

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Susan Pease Langford, Bruce Patrick Johnson, Office of Atlanta City Attorney Law Department, Atlanta, GA, for Movant.

Michael J. Bowers, Matthew B. Ames, Meadows Ichter & Trigg, Atlanta, GA, for Plaintiffs.

Sewell R. Brumby, Office of Georgia Legislative Counsel, Dennis Robert Dunn, Kyle A. Pearson, Office of State Attorney General, Atlanta, GA, for Defendants.

ORDER

THRASH, District Judge.

This is a voting rights action brought pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 42 U.S.C. § 1971 et seq., as amended. It is before the Court on Defendants' Motion to Dismiss [Doc. 5] pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6), Plaintiffs' Motion for Partial Summary Judgment [Doc. 13], Plaintiffs' Motion for Certification of Class Action [Doc. 17], and Defendants' Motion to Dismiss the Amended Complaint [Doc. 20].

I. BACKGROUND

The doctrine of "one person, one vote" is now a bedrock principle of federal constitutional law. This case is the latest chapter of a long saga in which this doctrine has been used to challenge political institutions in Georgia. A brief historical review will put this case in context. As far back as the first Georgia Constitution in 1777, Georgia apportioned legislative seats on a county-unit basis. Each county or group of counties was allocated one or more representatives. Larger counties generally received more representatives, but not proportionate to their population. With respect to the Georgia House of Representatives, the Constitution of 1877 and later the Constitution of 1945 provided that the six most populous counties would have three representatives each, the twenty-six next largest counties would have two representatives each, and the remaining counties (ultimately 127), would have one representative each. With respect to the Georgia Senate, each county initially had one senator. Later, Senate districts were adopted that generally consisted of three contiguous counties. In these districts, the Senate seat rotated each two years among the three counties.¹ An exception to this system was made for the State's two largest counties. Fulton County was a Senate district by itself. Chatham and Effingham counties constituted a two-county Senate district.

What became known as the "county-unit system" also was used to determine the winning candidate in statewide primary elections, first based on Georgia Democratic Party rules, and eventually as a result of the Neill Primary Act of 1917. The county-unit system was used for every statewide Democratic primary contest except for the election of 1908 when Governor Hoke Smith temporarily succeeded in repealing it.² In general, the county-unit system declared the candidate with a majority of the county units as the winner of the primary election. County units were awarded on a winner-take-all basis for each individual county. The candidate who won a plurality of the vote in a county received two votes multiplied by the number of representatives that county had in the Georgia House of Representatives.

For statewide races, the county-unit system had two principal effects. First, it effectively nullified the votes cast for all candidates except the winning candidate within a county, because the candidate who won the popular vote of a county received all county-unit votes for that county. This meant that a candidate could win a statewide primary election without anything close to a majority of the votes. For example, in 1954, Marvin Griffin won a majority of the county-unit votes and the Democratic Party's nomination for Governor with only thirty-six percent of the popular vote.³ Second, the county-unit system under-represented votes from the urban areas of the state. This disparity increased over time as the cities grew, and generally precluded the election to statewide office of individuals from urban areas.⁴ By 1946 a single vote for a statewide political candidate cast in sparsely populated Chattahoochee County counted 107 times more than a vote cast in the same election in urban Fulton County.⁵ In the General Assembly, the county-unit system led to severe malapportionment which dramatically increased in the decades after World War II. By 1960 legislators representing less than one-fourth of the population commanded clear majorities in both the Georgia House of Representatives and Georgia State Senate.⁶ The conservative, rural politicians and legislators who were its beneficiaries had no incentive whatsoever to reform the system.⁷

For the first sixty years of the twentieth century, the traditional legal conclusion was that such electoral malapportionment was a nonjusticiable political question that could not be redressed by a federal court. This traditional view, however, met its demise in March 1962 when the Supreme Court of the United States held in Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 188, 82 S.Ct. 691, 7 L.Ed.2d 663 (1962), that the method by which the State of Tennessee apportioned its state legislature was a justiciable controversy that the federal courts could address. One hour and seventeen minutes after the Supreme Court rendered its decision in Baker v. Carr, voters in Georgia filed suit in this Court challenging the constitutionality of the county-unit system in statewide primaries.⁸ A month later, a three-judge district court held, in a decision authored by then-Fifth Circuit Judge Griffin Bell, that the Georgia county-unit system as applied to statewide primaries was unconstitutional. The Court found "invidious discrimination" in the county-unit system's unequal weighting of votes and enjoined the State from using the system in the 1962 primaries. Sanders v. Gray, 203 F.Supp. 158, 170 (N.D.Ga.1962). In due course, the Supreme Court upheld the grant of the injunction, stating that "[t]he conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing— one person, one vote." Gray v. Sanders, 372 U.S. 368, 369, 83 S.Ct. 801, 9 L.Ed.2d 821 (1963).

A second action also was filed in this Court challenging the constitutionality of the apportionment of the Georgia General Assembly. Shortly after the District Court decision in Sanders v. Gray, a three-judge district court, speaking through Judge Elbert Tuttle of the Fifth Circuit, held that "so long as the Legislature of the state of Georgia does not have at least one house elected by the people of the State apportioned to population, it fails to meet constitutional requirements." Toombs v. Fortson, 205 F.Supp. 248, 257 (N.D.Ga. 1962), vacated in part, Fortson v. Toombs, 379 U.S. 621, 622, 85 S.Ct. 598, 13 L.Ed.2d 527 (1965).⁹ Within two years after Toombs v. Fortson was decided by this Court, the Supreme Court firmly extended the "one person, one vote" doctrine to the area of legislative apportionment, holding that equal protection requires seats in both houses of a bicameral state legislature to be apportioned according to population. Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 568, 84 S.Ct. 1362, 12 L.Ed.2d 506 (1964).

Full and effective participation by all citizens in state government requires ... that each citizen have an equally effective voice in the election of members of his state legislature. Modern and viable state government needs, and the Constitution demands, no less.

Id. at 565, 84 S.Ct. 1362. "One person, one vote" today is a bedrock constitutional principle that undergirds our system of representative democracy.

Based on the Supreme Court precedent of Reynolds v. Sims and its progeny, Plaintiffs have filed this action against the State of Georgia, its state legislative bodies, the Fulton County House and Senate delegations, other unspecified local legislative delegations, the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, the Speaker of the House, and other state government officials alleging that the State once again is violating the "one person, one vote" constitutional requirement. The gravamen of Plaintiffs' Amended Complaint is that the method by which the Georgia General Assembly enacts "local legislation" violates the principle of "one person, one vote." Local legislation is legislation that applies to a specific city, county, or special district. Major changes in local governments' governance must be approved by the General Assembly because local governments are creations of the State. Local legislation is introduced to create or abolish cities, change city boundaries, alter forms of local government, create local authorities or special districts, and make other changes that apply only to the particular political subdivision named in the bill. Local legislation typically comprises a large portion of the bills introduced in and enacted by the General Assembly each year. Approximately one-third of all legislation enacted by the General Assembly during its 2000 session was local legislation. In the 1999 session, local legislation constituted 52.5% of all enacted legislation.

To handle this volume of local legislation effectively and efficiently, the Georgia House of Representatives and Georgia State Senate have adopted internal procedures for the consideration of local legislation by their respective bodies. For each county, municipality, or other jurisdiction, there is a "local delegation" for that jurisdiction. The local delegation for each jurisdiction consists of all members of that house who represent any portion of the jurisdiction. These local delegations make recommendations to the House and Senate standing committees which recommend local legislation to the...