Opponents of Atlanta’s planned public safety training center will continue to gather signatures for its “Stop Cop City” referendum petition drive through September after originally planning to wrap up its campaign Monday.
The Vote to Stop Cop City Coalition said Aug. 21 that since June, it has collected 104,000 signatures in support of a referendum to allow Atlanta voters decide the fate of the planned $90 million training center, dubbed “Cop City” by opponents. Original plans to submit the signatures to the city on Aug. 21 were halted after coalition members accused the city of trying to thwart its use of direct democracy.
“[I]n recent days, the coalition began to hear from reporters and sources inside City Hall that the City of Atlanta is planning to argue for a higher-than-previously-reported legal minimum signature count for ballot access,” the coalition said in a news release.
“More concerning were reports that they also plan to utilize ‘signature match’ — an archaic and widely abandoned tool of voter suppression that has been widely condemned across the political spectrum, including by the Republican-controlled Georgia State Legislature — in their verification process,” according to the release.
The Vote to Stop Coalition has said it needs 58,203 verified signatures for its referendum to allow a public vote on repealing the city’s lease with the Atlanta Police Foundation, developer of the training center. The number is equivalent to 15% of registered voters in the city’s last election.
Information provided to Rough Draft by city officials denied there would be an attempt to raise the number of 58,203 signatures to gain ballot access.
At its Aug. 21 meeting, the Atlanta City Council approved a resolution authorizing the city attorney to hire an outside consultant to assist in the verification process. The city also announced it has hired former city clerk Foris Webb III to help supervise the line-by-line review of collected signatures to verify them against the state voter registration database.
“In an effort to ensure that adequate resources are dedicated to this project, the City of Atlanta — through the adoption of the Atlanta City Council — has developed a step-by-step process to conduct the audit of the documents, of which the signature verification process maybe a critical element,” said Interim Municipal Clerk Vanessa Waldon in a news release.
“We are committed to a transparent process that meets the requirements of the law and builds public confidence and trust,” Waldon said.
The process used by the Office of the Municipal Clerk will entail four steps:
- Petition Intake Process. When the petition is presented to Waldon, she will establish how many boxes of signature pages have been turned in, and seal them in front of the petitioners. She will then take the sealed boxes to a secure vault in the clerk’s office, where they will be kept secure until they are scanned.
- Scanning/Processing. Once received, the boxes will be individually opened, and their contents scanned to create an electronic image of every page. The petitioners will be provided with a copy of those electronic images, and the Office of the Municipal Clerk will provide a full copy of the scanned documents to the media. Members of the public at large can request a digital copy through an email address which will be provided online. Additionally, a searchable database will be created, which will be accessible to the general public at large. The originals will be kept secure as well.
- Review/Verification. Once individually designated and scanned, the completed lines will be reviewed to determine a) whether the name and other information present identifies and corresponds to a uniquely qualified Atlanta voter, and if so, b) whether those signatures match that of the unique voter.
“This will be a manual process, a line-by-line review, which will also include double-checking of each line and other quality control measures,” according to the city news release. “The review will rely on the official state voter registration database. Petition lines that do not pass the verification process will have detailed documentation as to the reason for the non-verification status.”
- Additional Public Comment/Inquiries. The city will not comment on the review once the verification process begins. Once the process is complete, all submitted pages will be available under the Georgia Open Records Act for the public, and the city will resume dialogue.
The Vote to Stop Cop City did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the city’s verification process guidelines.
The third guideline implies signature matching, a process that allows ballots to be rejected because of perceived signature mismatches. The ACLU and other civil rights groups have condemned the process as a tool of voter suppression.
“The City of Atlanta’s use of this arcane method to verify petition signatures in the push to get a referendum on Cop City on the ballot is the same method used for years by the GOP to throw out valid ballots cast by Georgia voters,” said Kendra Cotton, CEO of the New Georgia Project Action Fund, in a news release.
“It’s the same method that the State of Georgia stopped using because they had been sued so many times on this unfair, skewed, and politically motivated practice,” Cotton said.
City officials, however, said that referendums differ from regular elections. When voters casts ballots at a precinct for a local, state or federal race, they are required to present an ID to prove who they are. Provisional ballots also enable a person’s identity to be verified.
With a referendum, there is no ID required, so it would be up to the city clerk, the consultants and conversations with the petitioners to determine parameters for signature verifications, said city officials.
Although just over 58,000 verified signatures are needed to get a referendum on the ballot, the Vote to Stop Cop City Coalition wants to gather much more than 104,000 because they expect a majority of them to be tossed out by the city as invalid. But the coalition also believes the city fears putting “Cop City” to a vote.
“We’ve collected over 104,000 raw signatures around the City of Atlanta — from Southwest to Buckhead — and the people have decided. Cop City must be put on the ballot,” said Mary Hooks, Tactical Lead for the Referendum Coalition, in the release.
The coalition “wants to leave no doubt as to the will of Atlanta voters” and will continue collecting signatures through Sept. 23, a time extension granted by U.S. District Judge Mark Cohen.
“In addition, the coalition will consider upcoming opportunities for nonviolent, direct actions to direct the peoples’ frustration with council’s obstruction of the democratic process,” the Vote to Stop Cop City Coalition’s news release said.
“If the City needs to see a demonstration of the people’s commitment to this issue, we’re happy to provide one,” said Kamau Franklin of Community Movement Builders.