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FACED WITH ‘COP CITY’ REFERENDUM PUSH, ATLANTA CHANGES UP ITS
ELECTION RULES  
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Piper French
February 9, 2024
Bolt
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_ In an 11th-hour change, Atlanta approved new rules for citizen-led
petitions to include signature matching—a practice decried by Cop
City protesters and voting rights advocates. _

Activists deliver hundreds of thousands of signed petitions to
Atlanta’s City Hall in Sept. 2023 to force a referendum on Cop City.
The signatures have been stuck in limbo in the midst of a legal
battle, (Miguel Martinez/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, file)
/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

 

On January 29, two activists locked themselves to construction
equipment belonging to the main “Cop City” contractor
[[link removed].],
shutting down the work site in downtown Atlanta for hours. “Myself
and countless other residents have tried every legal avenue to Stop
Cop City—but the City government has stonewalled us every step of
the way,” an activist called Temperance said in a press statement.
“I don’t want to have to be doing this today, but direct action
and civil disobedience are the only options we have left.” Both
activists were arrested and jailed.

In a way, the movement was returning to its roots. In 2021, the fight
to stop Cop City began with direct action. After two years of protest,
organizers extended their effort to the ballot box. Some felt it was
critical to let Atlantans weigh in directly on the construction of a
vast new law enforcement training center
[[link removed]]—and
they were betting that the will of the people would ultimately come
down on their side. On a more practical level, a referendum campaign
struck Mary Hooks, a lead organizer for the Cop City vote coalition,
as a straightforward process with delineated steps and rules: a
signature collection phase, a break while the city verified them, then
on to a massive voter turnout effort. “We were like, ‘This seems
very clear in terms of the path that we need to be walking on_,_’”
she recalled. 

As it turns out, the path has been anything but clear. The Atlanta
city government has thrown up barriers
[[link removed]] at every turn,
miring the petition gathering and signature approval process in
bureaucratic and legal delays. The city has even drawn the ire
of mainstream Democratic politicians
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rights groups
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its attempts to deploy classic forms of voter restriction. 

These roadblocks were made possible by the fact that the organizers
are essentially starting from zero. Atlanta has never hosted a
citizen-led referendum before, and therefore has few established
structures in place to govern the process. “So much of what happened
over the course of the past two years was entirely preventable, had we
had a codified process that allowed everyone to know what the rules of
the game were,” said Rohit Malhotra, the founder and executive
director of Atlanta’s Center for Civic Innovation
[[link removed]].

Since last September, Malhotra and others have sought to address this
conundrum by drafting local legislation that would clarify the
referendum process, now and for the future. That, too, has been met
with interference from the mayor’s office. On Monday, the Atlanta
city council finally passed legislation codifying rules and
regulations for a referendum. But not before an 11th hour substitution
that reintroduced signature matching, a form of verification
that national voting rights groups have decried
[[link removed]] as
burdensome and discriminatory. “Our ask was simple—we just wanted
you to protect democracy.” Malhotra said
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public comment this week. “This body has continued to break its word
and to break our hearts.”

Now, as the Stop Cop City movement continues to wait for a federal
appeals court to hand down a decision about the legality of the
petition gathering process, there are still 16 boxes
[[link removed]] of
five month-old signatures sitting untouched in City Hall. But, amidst
this uncertainty, external deadlines are fast approaching. The
referendum was originally supposed to appear on last November’s
ballot, and it’s already too late for this year’s March
presidential primary election, too. Organizers are now debating
whether to aim for the ballot in May, when local primaries happen, or
wait until November, when the presidential election might force
Democrats nationally to weigh in on the fight, given Georgia’s
battleground status. If the decision comes late enough, and city
officials keep stalling, the choice may be made for them.

“If the city of Atlanta was really invested in elevating the voices
of its residents, they would at least be ready,” said Analilia
Mejia, the co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy
Action, a national network of 50 organizations, three of which are
local to Atlanta, that is supporting the referendum effort “They
wouldn’t be running a clock.” 

From the beginning, Cop City has revealed the fault lines present in
Atlanta’s system of representative democracy. Organizers started
talking about the possibility of a popular referendum as early as
September 2021. That was the month the city council first decided,
over strenuous public opposition, to turn hundreds of acres of land in
Atlanta’s South River Forest over to the Atlanta Police Foundation,
which planned to build a massive training center for law enforcement
and first responders—replete with a mock city to practice quelling
street protests, an explosives test site, and multiple gun ranges.
“By September (2021) it is clear that there’s organized money and
organized special interests pushing this,” said Mejia. “It then
becomes clear to us that we need organized people and some organized
money to counter it.”

After almost two years of protest, the push to bring Cop City to a
public vote came to fruition. In June 2023, in an echo of the 2021
meeting, the council voted to allocate tens of millions in public
funds toward the training center—again, after hours of public
comment, most of it against the measure. The coalition announced
[[link removed]] the
referendum campaign the following day. 

Atlanta’s city charter gave Stop Cop City organizers 60 days to
collect more than 58,000 signatures from city voters in order to get
on the November ballot, a challenge in itself. But, almost
immediately, the city started to stonewall. The city clerk delayed the
beginning of the petition process by quibbling over the petition’s
formatting, and in August, city officials announced
[[link removed]] that
Atlanta would implement “signature matching”—the process of
comparing a person’s signature on the petition to the one on file
for them in state voter records. 

Signature matching has been used in many states for other voting
practices, like authenticating absentee ballots. But it is widely
considered to be an unnecessarily onerous form of verification
that disproportionately excludes
[[link removed]] votes
from people of color, English language learners, and the elderly and
disabled. Atlanta’s decision to implement signature matching drew
wide condemnation, including from Democratic leaders like
Senator Raphael Warnock
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voting rights groups founded by former gubernatorial candidate Stacy
Abrams
[[link removed]].

The city has also fought organizers on who can collect signatures.
After residents in unincorporated areas of Dekalb County sued the
city—arguing they were unfairly excluded from the petition drive
despite living near the proposed training center site—a federal
judge ruled in their favor.
[[link removed]] The
judge’s order immediately expanded residency requirements for
canvassers and restarted the 60-day timeline to gather signatures. The
coalition says it delivered some 116,000 signatures in September
(nearly double what they need to get on the ballot), but the
city appealed
[[link removed]] and
has refused to tally them
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move forward with the referendum process until a federal appeals court
issues its opinion. 

As they wait for the court’s decision, Stop Cop City Vote organizers
have found themselves in limbo. “There’s a lot that I want to do
and would like to be doing versus going back and forth with the city
with something that should be so simple,” said Hooks. “We’re
here for the long game struggle,” she went on, but acknowledged that
the delays have taken a toll on some: “I know it’s been very
disappointing and demoralizing in a lot of ways.” 

One antidote to this frustration was to start work on the proposal to
codify a referendum procedure
[[link removed]]—a
parallel track that doesn’t affect the court’s decision, but would
jumpstart the process if the court rules in the organizers’ favor. 

The draft ordinance, crafted with the help of national voting rights
lawyer Marc Elias
[[link removed]] and
first introduced by Councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari in January, laid
out procedures for reviewing the referendum petitions. Crucially, it
aimed to preclude signature matching, which Malhotra called
“non-negotiable.” Instead, the ordinance proposed a “curing”
process
[[link removed]] to
resolve inconsistencies, like the accidental omission of a middle
name, that can trigger a signature invalidation.

But on Monday, two council members—including one who represents the
affluent Buckhead neighborhood, which has in the past sought to secede
from the rest of Atlanta and where many residents firmly support the
construction of Cop City—forced language into the legislation that
outlines a process for a version of signature matching. After
Malhotra spoke for 10 minutes
[[link removed]],
imploring the city council to amend the legislation to remove
signature matching, the body approved the ordinance anyway by a 10-5
vote. By then, the legislation had changed so much that Bakhtiari
voted against it. 

Chaos ensued, with organizers, including Mary Hooks, occupying the
dais [[link removed]] to
protest the last-minute change. “We see continuously the city
betraying everyday people and our right to vote on issues that matter
to us,” she told the room.

A federal appeals court ruling in the city’s favor could derail the
referendum process even further._ _The city could argue that since
the lower court’s earlier decision expanding the timeframe for
people to collect signatures was overturned, the circumstances of
their collection are now simply invalid—though Malhotra says such a
decision would make the city look even worse. “I don’t think the
mayor or the council, or the city in general, benefits from winning on
a technicality,” Malhotra said. “For them to be like: ‘Well, I
know we have these hundred and whatever thousand signatures but now
we’re going to burn them’—I think that that’s just a
politically silly thing for them to do.”
“But I don’t hold it beyond them,” he added. 

If the court rules in favor of the coalition, an entirely new scramble
will ensue. Per its charter, the city has 50 days to stand up a
referendum process. That’s where the new ordinance comes in. With
more than 100,000 signatures collected, coalition members say
they’re confident that they will cross the threshold even if some
signatures are thrown out. But the verification process could still
present issues. An analysis
[[link removed]] by
the Associated Press and several local news outlets found a high
number of seemingly invalid signatures. If the petition is approved
despite these challenges, the question will then be whether to vote on
it in May or November.

Many onlookers have struggled to understand why the city has invested
so much energy and risked so much bad press in continuing to block a
vote. “I cannot understand how the home of King and Lewis has the
audacity to fight basic democratic process for any other reason than
they are scared to lose,” said Malhotra. “From day one, this has
been a process and procedure failure—and rather than addressing that
underlying challenge, I think they underestimated the public’s
appetite for transparency on process and procedure, and overestimated
and overplayed their hand on trying to turn this into a binary
conversation about policing and public safety.”

While legislation codifying a referendum process has passed, albeit
with signature-matching included, there’s still no telling when the
federal appeals court decision may come. In the meantime, there will
be more direct actions. “Folks have said, like, ‘Hey, while
we’re waiting and the referendum’s in limbo, and we still gonna
give our elected officials the smoke—these corporations are also not
going to be let off the hook,’” Hooks said. “We’re not going
to lay the direct action component of this fight down just because the
state repression is coming.” 

Sixty-one Cop City activists have been indicted for violating
Georgia’s RICO act, and some 42 of them also have pending domestic
terrorism charges. This week, state and federal law enforcement
officers raided several Cop City opponents’ homes, taking at least
two people into custody and reportedly
[[link removed]] refusing
to show arrest warrants. 

On February 6, the Georgia state legislature passed a bill
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cash bail for offenses like racketeering, domestic terrorism, criminal
trespass, and “unlawful assembly.” It would also drastically limit
bail funds’ ability to bond out protestors like Hooks and others who
affixed themselves to construction vehicles on January 29. “On
Monday when I left home,” Hooks recalled, “my wife was like,
‘Please come back. Please come back_._’”

_This article is produced as a collaboration between Bolts
[[link removed]] and Mother Jones [[link removed]]._

_Piper French is a staff writer for Bolts. She lives in Los
Angeles. Her freelance work can be found in publications like New
York Review of Books, New York magazine, The Drift, and The
Nation. _

_Bolts is a digital magazine that covers the nuts and bolts of power
and political change, from the local up. We report on the local
elections and obscure institutions that shape public policy but are
dangerously overlooked in the U.S., and the grassroots movements that
are targeting them. We focus on two areas where local governments play
a key role: criminal justice and voting rights._

_When it comes to practices that balloon prisons or weaken democracy,
decisions are often made by an opaque ecosystem of institutions and
officials. Our journalism shines a spotlight on the levers of power
that influence democracy and mass incarceration—think of your local
judges, county clerks, or prosecutors—and the political battles
around them. We will later add other issue hubs (stay tuned). You
can make a donation [[link removed]] to support our
work._

* Cop City
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* Atlanta
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* democracy
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* Referendum
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