Opponents of Atlanta’s planned public safety training center said they will submit more than 100,000 signatures to the city of Atlanta Monday in an attempt to put the issue of the training center on the ballot. The number of signatures exceeds by at least 50,000 the number of 58,231 valid signatures the group needs from registered Atlanta voters to do so.
The group leading the effort, Cop City Vote Coalition, announced its plan Thursday, close to three months after the collection of signatures began and ahead of a new timeline a federal judge had granted the group. On July 27, Judge Mark Cohen’s ruling allowed non-Atlanta residents to collect signatures and extended the collection timeline by 60 days.
However, on Sept. 1, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted the city of Atlanta a temporary delay in the July 27 injunction.
The order by the 11th Circuit caused confusion, one of the plaintiffs in the case said, so organizers decided to go ahead and submit the signatures Monday instead of using the entire 60 days that Cohen’s ruling had allowed.
“It was a one-sentence ruling that just says that the stay of the injunction was granted but there were no stipulations that came with it, there were no instructions, so we really don’t understand what that stay actually means,” said Keyanna Jones, community leader and plaintiff in the federal case. “The only thing that was very clear to us is that we need to go ahead and submit the petitions that we have.”
Kamau Franklin, a community leader involved in the referendum effort, said they planned to submit the signatures by the original deadline of August 21 but decided to use the extra time granted by the injunction after having a breakdown in conversations with the city over the process that would be used to verify those signatures.
On August 21, the city announced former city clerk Emeritus Foris Webb III will return to City Hall to help supervise the line-by-line process that will verify each signature collected against state voter registration records.
The city outlined the verification process as follows:
The signature pages will be sealed in front of petitioners and taken to a secure vault until they are scanned. Petitioners and the media will then be provided with copies of the pages, and each page will be marked with a unique identifying designation. Then, each line will be reviewed to determined whether the name and other information present corresponds to a registered Atlanta voter, and whether those signatures match that of the unique voter.
Credit: NATRICE MILLER
Credit: NATRICE MILLER
Organizers, state and local officials, as well as local voting and civil rights groups expressed concerns over the city’s usage of signature match to verify the collected signatures, but Webb said the city “will not engage in signature exact matching” during the verification process and will only use “individual inspection of signatures” to determine validity when clarity is needed.
Opponents remain skeptical.
“We are more than confident that we have the valid signatures, what we are not confident in is the city’s process for verifying those signatures,” Jones said. “I don’t belief that the city of Atlanta’s municipal clerk’s office has any intention of being honest about the verification of these signatures.”
The decision to submit the signatures came days after the Attorney General’s Office released an indictment charging 61 protesters, who oppose the construction of the training center, with violating the state’s RICO act. Most of those indicted had previously been arrested in other protests and were charged with domestic terrorism.
Franklin said the RICO charges have long been expected but that they were surprised about the timing of the indictment, as the last arrests took place in May.
“The AG is obviously doing this for his own political purposes and I think it has no legal basis to stand and no factual basis to be anything close to RICO charges against a whole movement of people trying to exercise their First Amendment and constitutional rights to fight against Cop City,” Franklin said.
During a press conference announcing the indictments, Carr said his office is simply enforcing the laws of the state.
“As you can tell in this indictment, this is about violent acts plain and simple,” Carr said. “The individuals who have been charged, are charged with violent acts. We feel very good about our case and we will continue to prosecute it to the best of our ability.”
Credit: NATRICE MILLER
Credit: NATRICE MILLER
On Thursday, five people were arrested after chaining themselves to construction equipment at the site of the controversial facility. A group of about 50 protesters, including Franklin and Jones, gathered outside the Georgia State Capitol on Friday in protest of the indictments.
If the city doesn’t hold its end of the bargain on the referendum, Franklin said they are ready to battle in court. The goal remains to have the referendum in the upcoming November ballot.
“Our call is November. Honestly, if its March, we wouldn’t be pleased about it, but we would do March because our call is to have it on the ballot,” he said. “What we don’t want to happen is for them to attempt to throw out the signatures and to not let this be voted on, which we expect is what they really want to happen. They don’t want March and they don’t want November, they don’t want it at all.”
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