A Fayette County voting rights case set to go to trial Nov. 16 has been postponed.
The two sides in the case have been in court-ordered mediation for about two weeks. On Monday, U.S. Judge Timothy C. Batten Jr. signed an order for the trial to be "continued until further order of the court."
Batten was slated to preside over the trial involving the Georgia State Conference of the NAACP and Fayette commissioners and school board. The case centers on Fayette's voting system. The NAACP sued Fayette in 2011 saying its at-large voting system disenfranchised black voters and kept black candidates from getting elected to county office. It says district voting would be more equitable. But the county wants to preserve at-large or countywide voting saying it gives citizens ample chance to vote for all the candidates instead of just the one in their specific district. County officials argue that efforts district voting - used in two elections in the last year - was created using an artificial means of drawing district lines that some call gerrymandering.
The status of the mediation is unclear since both sides have been told not to talk about it.
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