Undermining Democracy at Every Turn

According to a Data for Progress poll, a majority of Atlanta residents want a chance to vote on the Cop City issue. The city government opposes this, and its response to the referendum has been a master class in bureaucratic obstruction.

Only a week after the referendum’s launch, Municipal Clerk Vanessa Waldon rejected the first version of the petition on a minor technicality. Undeterred, the Stop Cop City team sued Waldon on June 19 and called on the Fulton County Superior Court to approve the petition. Three days later, Waldon relented and approved it, setting a deadline of August 15, 2023, for the campaign to collect fifty-eight thousand signatures in order to get the referendum on the ballot.

By July, organizers had to confront another challenge: Georgia Code 36-35-3 states that those who are collecting signatures for a ballot initiative in a specific municipality must themselves be citizens of that municipality. This means that people from neighboring DeKalb County are not able to collect signatures for this proposed Atlanta ballot measure even though their community also borders the contended stretch of forest. In early July, organizers of the Stop Cop City campaign challenged this provision of the Georgia code in federal court. As they waited for the court decision, organizers collected thirty thousand signatures.

On July 27, 2023, Federal judge Mark Cohen ruled in favor of the Stop Cop City organizers, declaring the city’s limit on signature collectors unconstitutional. In doing so, Judge Cohen extended the deadline for signature-gathering to September 23, 2023. This extension enabled the campaign to continue but precluded the initiative from getting onto the November 2023 ballot due to time constraints outlined in the George code.

Having anticipated further sabotage to their campaign by the city government, Stop Cop City organizers sought to turn in their signatures one month before the September deadline. On the day that petitioners had hoped to submit their 104,000 collected signatures (far exceeding the 58,203 required to make it onto the ballot), Municipal Clerk Waldon and the City of Atlanta announced their intention to use signature matching, the practice of verifying signatures by comparing them directly to whatever signature is on record for individual voters. The practice has been contested in a court of law in multiple states because it disproportionately disenfranchises voters who may be elderly, disabled, transgender, or whose signatures may otherwise look different than what is on record.

In the face of this new institutional blow, organizers held on to the signatures and resolved to continue gathering even more up until the deadline to make their efforts undeniable. (As of February 5, 2024, the problematic process of signature matching has been baked into the formal language governing the ballot initiative process in Atlanta.)

To make matters worse for the organizers, on September 1, 2023, the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the City of Atlanta and issued a stay on the lower-court ruling from July, meaning that any signatures gathered by non-Atlanta citizens would once again be considered void. Despite these institutional challenges, in September 2023, Stop Cop City organizers turned in boxes containing more than 116,000 signatures.

City officials refused to verify them. In December, lawyers for the City of Atlanta brought the lower court decision back to the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals in the hopes of permanently overturning the decision.

One year later, the outcome of the appeal has yet to be adjudicated. The Atlanta City Council cites the stalling of this appeal as its primary reason for not verifying the submitted signatures. Meanwhile, the mayor’s office has spent an estimated $2.2 million on legal fees to keep the initiative from making it on the ballot. According to the Atlanta People’s Campaign, “at any time, the mayor’s office can drop its appeal, or the Council can just pass a resolution to place it on the ballot themselves” — but those in power refuse to allow citizens the opportunity to make choices for their own city.

Even so, community organizers remain steadfast in their opposition to the Cop City project. This September, Vote to Stop Cop City advocates released 116,000 ping-pong balls in the city council chambers, interrupting the meeting proceedings for over twenty minutes to remind the representatives that they have “dropped the ball” on democracy.

More at Stake

The Atlanta city government’s “dropping the ball” has not been carried out in error. Rather, it has been an intensive, expensive, and intentional assault against its own citizens’ right to vote on city projects that directly impact them and their families. In the city’s attack on the Stop Cop City ballot initiative campaign, Atlanta is doing more than just defending the establishment of a police training center. It is blatantly subverting democratic principles.

In a representative democracy, citizens are constantly bombarded with encouragement to vote for certain candidates in the hope that they stand true to their campaign promises. Many don’t, but by the time their hypocrisy or ineptitude becomes evident, their power and influence as incumbents can make them hard to replace. But the ballot initiative process is different — it’s a democratic process allowing citizens to bypass the labyrinth of political intermediaries and directly propose and vote on issues that shape their lives. It’s this directness that makes it so threatening to those who prefer their democracy filtered through layers of bureaucratic management and corporate influence.

By working to undermine the vote to stop Cop City, members of the Atlanta City Council are not only turning their backs on the desires of the constituency that elected them in the first place but also weakening voters’ power to decide what is best for them. Each roadblock, each legal maneuver, each procedural delay is another brick in the wall between the people and their power to govern themselves. That’s by design, as officials clearly see the will of the people as a threat to their own power.

By all appearances, the City of Atlanta will continue to stall, leverage their knowledge of political loopholes, and use harmful voter suppression practices to quash the Stop Cop City ballot initiative campaign. But they should expect continued resistance from the citizens of Atlanta too. Atlanta representatives are showing us they’re scared of what it means when citizens have a say in how their own city is governed — and maybe they should be.