The head of Fayette County’s elections office is spending much of his time this week dispelling rumors and answering calls from misinformed voters concerned that pending lawsuits will disrupt the July primary.
They won’t.
“I’ve been on the phone constantly,” Tom Sawyer, Fayette County’s Board of Elections director, said Wednesday, the first day for candidates to officially enter this year’s races. “The public, I don’t think, will be directly impacted.”
Two pending lawsuits are at the root of the confusion for voters trying to understand complex election laws, and that confusion is the reason for time pressures on county workers as they ready for the July 31 primaries.
“The people most impacted right now are would-be candidates,” said Wayne Kendall, the attorney representing 10 voters in a lawsuit against Fayette County's commissioners, school board members and the Board of Elections. “There’s no clarity on the district lines so that a person who wants to run for office is not sure which district he or she may actually live in at this point, which keeps them from knowing which district they actually qualify for.”
The rumors started when a federal judge ordered on Tuesday that qualifying for three seats on the Fayette County Board of Commissioners be pushed to next week because the U.S. Department of Justice had not yet approved a map that puts about the same number of people in each district. Hours after the judge's order, that approval came, but it was too late to return qualifying for the Board of Commissioners to this week, Sawyer said.
At the same time, there is another pending lawsuit that says the county’s at-large system is illegal because it requires each county commissioner and member of the Board of Education be elected by the entire county and not just the voters in their respective districts.
The federal suit says the at-large voting system remains intact to prevent black voters from electing the candidates of “their choice.”
More than 20 percent of the people in Fayette County are African-American, and 39.4 percent of the students in the public school system are black.
Laughlin McDonald -- director of the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project and author of a book on the topic -- said at-large voting became the trend in the South in response to federal civil rights and voting rights laws in an effort to keep blacks out of elected office.
“It dilutes minority voting strength. It means the white majority can control all the seats and voting is racially polarized,” McDonald said.
That is the claim made in a federal lawsuit filed last August.
The Fayette Board of Education has since voted to abandon the at-large system, but it still needs U.S. Department of Justice approval of the proposed districts. Consequently, whoever is elected to the three seats on the Board of Education that will be on the ballot this year must be selected by all who vote in that race, not just the people in the districts. If the change is approved, it would take effect with the next election.
The Board of Commissioners, however, has refused to settle the suit. The board said in a court filing African-Americans in the county did not cluster in neighborhoods to the extent that compact districts could be drawn.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten has scheduled a hearing on the issue for next Wednesday. Once qualifying starts, the election process has begun, so it's highly unlikely the hearing would affect this year's election.
The NAACP complaint notes that no African-American holds any of the elected offices now. In the county’s 190-year history, only one black candidate has won a “retention" election -- Judge Charles Floyd, who was appointed to the Magistrate Court in 2002 and stayed on the bench until his death in 2010.
The suit said every African-American who has run for the Board of Education or the Board of Commissioners has lost.
“Elections in Fayette County show a clear pattern of racially polarized voting,” the lawsuit said. "Although black voters are politically cohesive, bloc voting by other members of the electorate consistently defeats black-preferred candidates.”
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