AMONG THE NUMEROUS DEVICES used in the United States to thwart popular control of government, perhaps none has such notoriety as the county unit system of Georgia. Rural, minority control of state government lingers in most states of the union, but in none has this control been made so secure as in Georgia. In other states, popular majorities have been able to gain limited access to government through the governor; however, in Georgia minority control even of the governor, as well as of other executive officers and the higher judiciary, is assured by the county unit system. Some people insist that apportionment in the rural-dominated legislature and the county unit system are two different problems. Yet actually they are very closely related: county unit votes are distributed according to the number of members in the county delegation to the state House of Representatives two for one. The constitution of Georgia provides that each of the 8 most populous counties shall have three representatives in the House of Representatives; the 30 next most populous counties, two each; and the remaining 121 counties, one each.' Re-allocation is made after each decennial census. The sparsely populated counties dot the map of the whole state, but principally they stretch across agricultural Middle and South Georgia (see Map I). Furthermore, it is in this agricultural area that the percentage of Negroes in the population is highest (see Map II). And, as is true throughout the South, wherever rural Negroes are concentrated, there rural whites most effectively disfranchise them, legally and extralegally (by the use of such devices as literacy tests and direct physical intimidation, respectively), and otherwise dominate society. The small, agricultural counties, by sheer weight of their number, are able to overwhelm in the state legislature the populous, urban counties, located principally in industrial North Georgia and along an industrial and commercial belt in Middle Georgia.2 This rural, white dominance through number of counties is reinforced by the narrowness of the spread from one to three in county representative strength in the House. Since county power in the decisive Democratic primary election, through the county unit system, is an exact multiple of county strength in the House, and since whites dominate politics in the many rural counties, the politics of Georgia is agrarian and white supremacist. By the Neill Primary Act of 1917, as amended,3 any political party that holds a statewide primary must determine the winners by application of the