One Person, Seven Votes

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

For the first six decades of Willie Gill's life, the winding dirt road next to his house in Chilton County, Alabama, was a nuisance. If trucks weren't churning its surface into clouds of red dust, rains were turning it into a swamp. Gill, who is black, never really expected the all-white county commission to do much about it. "But Mr. Agee, he come and put in a paved road just about last year," Gill reports. "I'm glad to have it."

Gill is no fire-breathing radical. Nor is Bobby Agee, a 43-year-old funeral director who six years ago became the county's first black commissioner since Reconstruction. Yet Gill's road would not have been paved had he and other Chilton County blacks not voted for Agee seven times apiece -- legally. It was an act that, radical or not, put them in the vanguard of a ballot-casting experiment called cumulative voting, one of a brace of methods hailed by some as the future of suffrage but labeled antidemocratic by no less an authority than Bill Clinton.

Traditionally Americans are uneager to tinker under the hood of the voting machine. There is one major recent exception, however: minority voting rights. In 1982, when it had long been obvious that white majorities throughout the country were -- legally -- freezing black minorities out of any office whatsoever, Congress revised the Voting Rights Act. Combined with related court cases, the revision compels areas with histories of discrimination to create voting districts where minorities can get elected. Almost invariably this was read as a call to carve out geographic districts where blacks, Hispanics or Native Americans were the majority.

The solution is imperfect. Some scholars object outright to any government engineering of racial advantage. Other critics note that whites in the newly created districts become a new voiceless minority. A third group grimaces at the gerrymanders spawned when districters create land bridges between geographically dispersed minority members. Nonetheless, the districts were generally accepted as a necessary evil. Their critics from the right risked portrayal as troglodytes. And when Lani Guinier, Clinton's ill-fated candidate for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, entered stage left, having penned articles suggesting some alternatives, the backpedaling President called them "antidemocratic" and "difficult to defend."

Within weeks of her nomination's withdrawal, however, Guinier found an unlikely ally. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor ruled that districts like North Carolina's serpentine 12th were "bizarre" and might be challenged as perpetuating "political apartheid." Many voting-rights champions, facing language that seemed to question their very enterprise, were stymied.

Not so Judge Joseph H. Young of Maryland. Ruling two weeks ago on a Voting Rights Act suit against Worcester County, Maryland, Young bade it change -- not by adding a black-majority enclave, but by adopting one of Guinier's reviled alternatives, cumulative voting. Meanwhile, the New York Times had published a speculative plan drafted by the Washington-based Center for Voting and Democracy explaining how North Carolina could erase its troublesome 12th * in favor of the same system. Suddenly one of Lani's Follies looked like it might be the wave of the future.

You can't study it in Maryland, however: Young's decision has been appealed. You must go to Chilton County, one of three sizable areas (the others are Alamogordo, New Mexico, and Peoria, Illinois) where cumulative voting is established.

Unlike Montgomery, 40 miles distant, Chilton has never been an activist hotbed, perhaps because this peach-farming flatland is only 12% African American. "The blacks pretty much blend in with us," says Judy Smith, who owns a Sno Biz shaved-ice stand. "Every once in a while they get rowdy, but they're not quite as bad as they are elsewhere." Be that as it may, in 1985 a black political group called the Alabama Democratic Conference brought a voting-rights suit against Chilton and some surrounding municipalities. Nearby towns opted to create black-majority districts, but Chilton's highly dispersed black population would have necessitated a horrific gerrymander. Instead the county undertook cumulative voting for a seven-seat county commission. When the 1988 ballots were printed, there were seven blank spaces next to the name of each of 14 candidates. Voters were told they could distribute seven votes in any way they chose.

Academic proponents of cumulative voting swear by such a system's mathematical elegance. When filling seven seats, even though blacks make up only 11% of Chilton's voters, if they "plump" all seven of their votes for one candidate, that person should almost inevitably be elected -- without any outright governmental action on behalf of a specific minority. Of course, the same academics swear the system isn't confusing. Chilton County Probate Judge Bobby Martin, who oversaw the 1992 commission elections, differs. He says dozens of voters penciled in more than seven votes: "There were so many mistakes, we almost ran out of ballots."

And yet, when the corrected votes were tallied, the results were a voting- rights dream. Seven people were elected. Six were white. But the seventh was Agee, who received the highest vote total, suggesting he got seven votes each from nearly every black adult in the county.

As the sole black candidate for the commission, Agee was a natural magnet for multiple votes. The numerous white candidates were not. O.J. McGriff understands. McGriff, a white man, was a 26-year veteran of the county school board when a cumulative election for that body knocked him off. "A lot of % people thought I had it made, so they split their votes," he says. "I've learned a lesson. With cumulative voting, you're running against everybody -- like you're a potato in a basket." The system, he claims, is fair to minorities but not majorities, "and ((white)) people don't like it. They don't like it at all."

Commissioner Julius Kelley would disagree. "We needed a black on the commission, and we got a good one," he says. Kelley can afford to be generous. He is living proof that cumulative voting's leg up to minorities is color blind. Like blacks, Chilton's white Republicans were hungry political underdogs. They too "plumped" -- and reaped three commissioners' seats.

It is far too early in Chilton County's career as a cumulative testing ground for all of the system's permutations to have expressed themselves. Its critics suggest that it will empower not only "legitimate" minorities, but (in a seven-seat election) any fringe dweller who can enthrall 12% of the voters -- the David Dukes as well as the Bobby Agees. Even without kooks, they fear it will create mosaic governments paralyzed by factionalism. Others predict that once minority members realize cumulative systems provide an automatic "safe seat," numerous candidates will split the vote, and the seat will disappear. Exactly that happened last year in Centre, a small town about 100 miles away, which also tried cumulativism: a black made the city council in 1988, but four years later he had black competition, and the council reverted to lily-white.

Yet none of the larger experiments has followed suit. In Alamogordo, Inez Moncada, whom a 1987 cumulative vote turned into the 24%-Hispanic city's first Hispanic councilperson in decades, was re-elected handily in each subsequent vote. (The cumulative arrangement ended this year, however, and it remains to be seen whether she will retain her seat when the system reverts.) Peoria has had only one cumulative election, which created a black councilman.

Chilton County had another election in 1992. Researchers from the University of New Orleans who conducted exit polls report that relations between races at the polling places were cordial but tense. Of the white voters polled, 48% said they found the election experience "poor," but 88% understood it well enough to know you could cast all seven votes for the same candidate. As for blacks, the overwhelming majority approved of cumulative voting; 87% clumped all their votes on one candidate, and Bobby Agee was re-elected.

"When I grew up," Agee says, "anybody that was in any authority was white. It was frustrating. We'd get a white politician that would come in and promise everything, and then when they won, they didn't know you." He is receiving friends at his business. His tone is soft, almost apologetic, but his small handlebar mustache and his pink tie and matching handkerchief suggest a healthy self-image. Some wonder whether perhaps he is too moderate. His response may relieve those who resent his judicially mandated rise, not to mention its newfangled engineering. "I'm only one person on the board," he says. "I've got to work within the system. Sure, I could take them to court every time we disagree, but that's not how it works best."

With reporting by Wendy Cole/New York and David Rynecki/Clanton