The decision to maintain their now unusual schemes stemmed from fear that Congress might pass a “force bill,” in an attempt to require states to abide by federal laws relating to elections. Congress had passed several of these laws during Reconstruction as the federal government fought the Ku Klux Klan. And in 1890, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge proposed an Elections Bill, which would have mandated federal supervision of House elections. Southern states knew that such supervision would threaten their ostensibly neutral, but actually racially based, exclusions to voting. Lodge’s bill narrowly passed in the House before Southern senators successfully filibustered it in the Senate, the first of the modern southern-led filibusters on racial issues.
The four Southern states worried that Southern senators might not be able to hold off the tide forever. By maintaining off-year elections, they wanted to insulate at least their state-office elections from this threat of federal oversight.
They knew that any weakening of their ability to discriminate and exclude would threaten conservative whites’ grip on power. Twice—in Virginia in the 1880s and in North Carolina in the 1890s—coalitions of white and Black voters had disrupted the conservative white hold on southern states, and they were determined to avoid a recurrence. At the Virginia constitutional convention of 1901-2, future congressman, senator, and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Carter Glass made this explicit: “Discrimination! Why, that is precisely what we propose." The convention was elected, he said, to “discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations of the Federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally.”
In Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Kentucky that meant not only literacy tests and poll taxes, but also bucking the trend toward one standardized election calendar.
In 1947, New Jersey joined this off-year-election group, likewise aiming to protect itself from federal trends, if quite different ones. Republican Governor Alfred E. Driscoll drove the shift, worried that the rising New-Deal-Democratic tide could sweep his state. In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had won his third election in a row, and, riding his coattails, a Democrat won the governorship of New Jersey. In 1947, the state held a constitutional convention, and while it altered elections in several ways—moving from three-year terms for governors to four and enabling them to be reelected to a second term, for instance—it refrained from aligning state elections with federal ones, ensuring that there would be no repeat of 1940.