A back-room meeting between local power brokers in Atlanta, including a top aide to the city’s mayor, led to the last-minute scuttling of an ordinance that could have helped people get to vote on whether to build a controversial police and fire department training center known as “Cop City”.
Mounting a referendum campaign allowing voters to decide on Cop City is one of many strategies opponents to the center have adopted in a movement that has gained worldwide attention while taking on concerns ranging from police militarization to environmental racism and deforestation in an era of climate crisis. The center is planned for a 171-acre footprint in a forest south-east of Atlanta.
A coalition of voting rights and pro-democracy law firms in the US drew up the ordinance to codify how the city would verify and count voter signatures on petitions to place questions on ballots in general, since the training center campaign is the first such local democracy effort in the capital of Georgia’s 176-year history – and no such process exists.
But in a meeting behind closed doors during the city council meeting last week, where the city councilwoman Liliana Bakhtiari was planning to introduce the ordinance, a deputy chief of staff to the Democratic mayor, Andre Dickens, objected to wording that would have made the process for handling petitions effective immediately, thus covering the Cop City referendum effort, according to a person who was in the room and spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity.
Bakhtiari returned to the meeting and never introduced the ordinance. Neither the mayor’s office nor Bakhtiari returned requests for comment.
“There’s an anti-democratic tendency here,” said Rohit Malhotra, a member of the referendum coalition, in a public zoom call on Thursday night on the latest developments in the referendum. “They need to stop debating this behind closed doors.”
Cop City Vote organizers spent months gathering 116,000 signatures in order to reach a required threshold of about half that number of verified, registered voters. Referendum efforts in other parts of the country often have about half of petition signers disqualified for technical reasons such as being registered to vote in a neighboring municipality.
In the Cop City case, once the threshold of about 58,000 signatures is reached, the city is required to put the question about the training center’s future on a forthcoming ballot.
Among other things, the ordinance as drafted prohibited the use of “signature matching” to verify voters, a method the Atlanta city clerk’s office said in August it would use to evaluate the petitions.
This method, favored by Republican officials, relies on matching signatures on ballots or petitions to existing signatures in public records – and has been successfully litigated against many times due to its unconstitutional tendency to disproportionately affect marginalized populations, such as people with disabilities.
The ordinance effort came as the referendum had been stalled for three months, with boxes of petitions sitting uncounted in city hall. Atlanta appealed a judge’s decision about who was eligible to collect those signatures and said in September it would not start counting and verifying them until after 14 December, when a federal appeals court hears oral arguments in the case.
Experts have told the Guardian the whole process leading up to the effort to break the logjam via the ordinance has been anti-democratic and fraught with moves by the city that threaten referendums as a tool for expressing the wishes of voters, particularly in the south, where such campaigns are much less common historically than other parts of the US.
This includes the issue at the heart of the case now with the 11th circuit court of appeals. Initially, the referendum campaign sued to allow residents of neighboring DeKalb county to help gather signatures on the petitions to put the Cop City question on the ballot, even though only Atlanta voters could sign. The rationale: the Atlanta-owned site for the training center is actually in DeKalb, surrounded by mostly Black neighborhoods, and residents should be able to participate in the canvassing effort.
A federal judge agreed and in late July extended the deadline for organizers to turn in petitions. Then, in August, as the city announced its intention to use “signature matching”, it also appealed the judge’s decision. An 11th circuit judge ruled in the city’s favor, granting a temporary stay on the earlier decision – and throwing the whole process into limbo. Shortly afterward, in early September, the Cop City Vote coalition turned in the petitions with 116,000 signatures, and the city cited the court case as the basis for not evaluating them.
This issue has come up elsewhere, and courts have favored expansive interpretations of who can gather signatures.
“With signature gathering, trying to restrict people from outside the jurisdiction [of the referendum], many of the cases have been struck down by federal courts as restricting free speech,” said Ryan Byrne, managing editor for ballot measures at Ballotpedia, a non-profit organization that covers elections and politics.
Sarah Walker, director of policy and legal advocacy at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, said “who can gather signatures” was one of the issues increasingly used in the last decade to make it more difficult for civic and other groups to succeed in getting questions on ballots through referendums. At the same time, she added, the Cop City case “is the first time I’m seeing this sort of thing with Democratic municipalities”.
Another stunning development took place several weeks after organizers turned the petitions in, when the city clerk posted them online – with no redactions. This meant anyone could see the addresses and phone numbers of 116,000 people who supported voting on Cop City. The move has been roundly criticized by experts. “They don’t have a legitimate reason to post at all,” said Walker. “It’s hard not to conclude this is an effort to undermine or create mistrust.”