U.S. Sues Charleston County, S.C., Alleging Violation of Black Voting Rights

The at-large voting system in Charleston County, S.C., deprives black voters of representation and should be dismantled, the Justice Department maintains in what will most likely be the last civil rights case brought by the Clinton administration.

All nine members of the Charleston County Council are elected by residents of the entire county, where whites are a majority of the 300,000 people. As a result, the Justice Department said in a suit filed there on Wednesday, black voters have been unable to elect black representatives, a dilution of voting strength that the department says violates the Voting Rights Act.

About 31 percent of the county's voting-age population is black. But the Council has only one black member, Tim Scott, a Republican who, the suit notes, was rejected by voters in the county's black precincts.

County officials, who pointed out that voters approved the at-large system in a 1989 referendum, said they would fight the suit.

''Single-member districts are the worst thing that could happen to good government,'' said Barrett S. Lawrimore, the Council chairman, a retired university extension agent who lives in the city of Charleston. ''I've seen it happen time and again that single-member representatives get too parochial and only care about their districts, not the common good.

''And we've already got a minority on the Council,'' he said of Mr. Scott.

Samuel W. Howell, the county attorney, said he believed that lawyers in the Justice Department's civil rights division filed the suit in the last days of the Clinton administration because they feared that George W. Bush and his choice for attorney general, John Ashcroft, would be far less aggressive in pursuing voting rights cases.