As the Georgia runoff elections approach, NBC News correspondent Priscilla Thompson stretched to portray the runoff process as a racist system designed to prevent African Americans from getting elected in a report that aired both on CNBC's The News with Shepard Smith and on MSNBC Live.
In a pre-recorded piece that recalled the creation of the system by a segregationist in the 1960s, Thompson incorrectly claimed that it's almost all Southern states that hold such runoffs that are designed to ensure the winner has to win more than 50 percent of the vote, when, in fact, California and Washington state have similar elections.
Even though Democrats have been complaining for four years that President Donald Trump was able to get elected with just 46 percent of the popular vote, Thompson flipped the script and suggested that requiring a popular majority to win in Georgia "remains a glaring reminder of the systemic racism ingrained in the fabric of America, lingering in one of the values we hold most dear -- democracy."
After the report began by noting that most voters know few details about why the system was devised, Thompson went to a soundbite of Southern Methodist University politics Professor Cal Jillson to immediately inject race: "Back to the Civil War, blacks were a major part of the Southern electorate. Once Reconstruction and military occupation of the South ended, white Southerners spent the rest of the 19th century squeezing blacks out of the electorate."
While recalling that the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1960s had outlawed Georgia's old system of giving disproportionate power to rural areas, the NBC correspondent informed viewers that then-state legislator Denmark Groover proposed runoffs. Jillson recounted: "Groover explicitly talked about how, even if the white vote were divided in the first election and a black made the runoff, whites could come together as a majority to win in the runoff."
Thompson noted that Maine also has runoff system as she suggested that runoffs are only racially motivated if they are held in Southern states:
Not all runoff systems are rooted in racism. Maine, for example, has a very small black population, but it uses a ranked choice system that's effectively an instant runoff if no candidate reaches 50 percent. But if you look at the seven states that hold traditional runoff elections, if nobody gets a majority, all of those states are in the South.
The NBC News correspondent not only incorrectly included Oklahoma on her on-screen list as a Southern state, but she also neglected to inform viewers that California and Washington hold open primaries and only allow the two top finishers on the ballot for the November Election Day, ensuring that the winner has to earn more than 50 percent of voters.
Thompson was also so fixated on the race angle from the 1960s, she did not bother to divulge any of the more relevant considerations from recent decades. After Democratic Senator Wyche Fowler lost a runoff in 1992, Georgia's Democratic-controlled legislature changed the threshold to 45 percent, which helped Democrat Max Cleland get elected with 49 percent of the vote in 1996.
When Republicans took control of the legislature in 2005, they restored the 50 percent threshold, perceiving that the state's unusually strong Libertarian party was siphoning votes from Republican candidates in the November election.
A nearly identical report ran on Thursday's The News with Shepard Smith on CNBC, and again on Saturday's MSNBC Live with Kendis Gibson and Lindsey Reiser.
The report on MSNBC Live was sponsored in part by Gold Bond, Their contact information is linked.
Transcript is below:
MSNBC Live
December 19, 2020
6:41 a.m. Eastern
CORI COFFIN, FILL-IN CO-HOST: As the race heats up, you may be wondering why Georgia has this unique style of runoff voting. NBC's Priscilla Thompson has been looking into it.
PRISCILLA THOMPSON, NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: For more than 50 years, Georgia has used runoff elections to decide races from members of the state legislature to who sits in the governor's mansion. But do people really know why the runoff system was established in the first place?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: I'm not sure, like, really where it comes from.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: I have no idea.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: We have to determine who the actual winner is with a clear majority.
THOMPSON: But some experts say that wasn't the original intent of the law.
PROFESSOR CAL JILLSON, SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY: Back to the Civil War, blacks were a major part of the Southern electorate. Once Reconstruction and military occupation of the South ended, white Southerners spent the rest of the 19th century squeezing blacks out of the electorate.
THOMPSON: White Southerners developed a county unit system to give less populated but primarily white rural parts of the state more political power, meanwhile disenfranchising black voters. In 1962, the Supreme Court said the system violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
JILLSON: At that point, many Southern states, including Georgia, looked for other devices, and the runoff system was one of those devices.
THOMPSON: Enter Denmark Groover. Groover, a member of Georgia's House of Representatives, fell out of power, and he blamed, quote, "Negro bloc voting," for his loss, according to a report by the U.S. Department of the Interior. A vocal segregationist, Groover was determined to stop black Georgians' growing political power. Quote, "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," Groover would say in a deposition years later. In 1963, one year after the Supreme Court struck down the county unit system, Groover, now back in office, proposed a new election system, the runoff.
JILLSON: Groover explicitly talked about how, even if the white vote were divided in the first election and a black made the runoff, whites could come together as a majority to win in the runoff.
THOMPSON: Not all runoff systems are rooted in racism. Maine, for example, has a very small black population, but it uses a ranked choice system that's effectively an instant runoff if no candidate reaches 50 percent. But if you look at the seven states that hold traditional runoff elections, if nobody gets a majority, all of those states are in the South. As for Georgia, in a year marked by widespread protests and demands for racial and social justice --
CLIP OF PROTESTERS: No justice! No peace!
THOMPSON: -- the state's runoff system remains a glaring reminder of the systemic racism ingrained in the fabric of America, lingering in one of the values we hold most dear -- democracy.
