To win an election in Georgia, a candidate must receive more than 50% of the vote.
If no one clears that threshold, the top two vote-getters face each other again in a runoff election, where a simple majority decides the winner.
But Georgia and Mississippi go a step further.
They apply this rule to both primary and general elections.
That means a single seat can require up to four separate votes in one year: a primary, a primary runoff, a general election, and a general election runoff.
Georgia’s runoff system was created by segregationists who wanted to dilute Black voting power. Its chief architect was a state legislator named Denmark Groover, who had recently lost an election due to his opponent’s support from Black voters. He pushed to require a second round of voting whenever no candidate won an outright majority.
The logic was straightforward: in a majority-white electorate, a one-on-one runoff would almost always favor the white candidate over one backed primarily by Black voters.
Groover left no ambiguity about his intentions: “if you want to establish if I was racially prejudiced, I was. If you want to establish that some of my political activity was racially motivated, it was.”
In recent years, Georgia’s runoff system has had enormous consequences.
The general election in November 2020 produced no majority winner in either of Georgia’s two Senate races. David Perdue and Jon Ossoff advanced to one runoff, while Raphael Warnock and Kelly Loeffler advanced to another.
Both Georgia runoffs determined the balance of the U.S. Senate under the incoming Biden administration. Winning both seats gave the Democratic caucus 50 seats and an effective majority with Vice President Kamala Harris casting tie-breaking votes.
In Georgia, the election is rarely over on Election Night. If you vote in a primary or general election and your candidate doesn’t clear 50%, mark your calendar. There will be a runoff, and your vote matters just as much the second time around.
