A few days ago, Harvard Law Professor and leading voting rights scholar and advocate, Lani Guinier, joined the ancestors, all too soon. Notably, conservative attacks on Guinier in the early 1990s foreshadowed today’s democracy-killing attacks on voting rights.

To my knowledge, I never met Professor Guinier; however, I feel a kind of kinship. I knew of her father, Ewart Guinier, who was appointed chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University when Harvard was not enthused about having such a department.

And I worked closely with her mother, Eugenia Guinier, an aide to Saundra Graham, a Black legislator in the Massachusetts State House. As chair of the Massachusetts Black Legislative Caucus, Graham sponsored legislation to fund a research center at UMass/Boston, which I was recruited to develop and direct.

Lani Guinier’s project was to attack the ills of majority rule in voting and push for ways to combat it and make voting more democratic and fairer.

In her scholarship, she indicated the frequent problem where 51 percent of people win a vote and get 100 percent of the power they do not share.

Guinier argued that in a racially divided society (such as ours, of course), majority rule might be perceived as majority tyranny.

She referred to discussions of the country’s Founding Fathers, especially James Madison, who wrote that the tyranny of the majority required safeguards to protect one part of society against the injustice of the other part, the majority.

Guinier promoted cumulative voting (CV) as a solution. CV is a commonly used proportional representation method.

In CV, voters cast as many votes as there are seats. But unlike winner-take-all systems, voters are not limited to giving only one vote to a candidate. Instead, they can put multiple votes on one or more candidates. For instance, in an election for a five-seat body, voters could choose to give one vote each to five candidates, two votes to one candidate and three to another, or all five votes to a single candidate. Suppose members of a minority group work together and get behind a single candidate, providing all their votes to this candidate. In that case, they can hope to get someone elected, even if they only make up a small share of the population. 

CV was used to elect the Illinois state legislature for over 100 years. In recent years CV has been used in over 50 jurisdictions. Further, many corporations use cumulative voting to elect their boards of directors. Additionally, Both Republican president Ronald Reagan and Republican president George W. Bush approved CV to correct issues in cases arising from violations of the Voting Rights Act.

After leading the Voting Rights Project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, serving in President Jimmy Carter’s administration in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and being a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, Guinier was nominated by President Bill Clinton to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. She seemed to be the perfect person for the position. Yet all hell broke loose.

Two sets of shameful acts ensued. First, despite the long history of CV, conservatives went on the warpath, misrepresenting her scholarship, accusing her of being a “quota queen,” and worse. President Clinton wilted under these false accusations and withdrew the nomination of his friend.

President Clinton demonstrated something we learned from a newspaper editor in Arkansas on the night of Clinton’s election to the presidency. The man said, “I hope that when he gets up there in Washington, he will develop a backbone. He never exhibited one here.”

Clinton exhibited his spinelessness by bowing to the wishes of the conservatives and withdrawing the nomination even though Bill Clinton was a law school classmate and had attended Guinier’s wedding.

Nevertheless, Lani Guinier’s ideas were seeing fruition until the recent attacks on voting by Republicans moved the ball significantly backward.