Atlanta Democrats Blocked the Cop City Referendum, Alienating Voter Turnout

The sun bore down on the tens of thousands of Georgians crowded into the Atlanta Civic Center parking lot on Saturday afternoon, as Vice President Kamala Harris delivered her closing argument ahead of Tuesday’s election. The choice is clear, said Harris, “in less than 90 days, it’s either going to be him or me in the Oval Office.”

Harris’s impromptu visit to Atlanta in the last stretch of the election showcases just how important the region is for her campaign. Four years ago, Georgia went for Joe Biden — breaking a nearly 30-year streak of Democratic losses at the presidential level. The razor-thin win — Biden won the state by roughly 12,000 votes — was made possible by organizers who worked day and night to get out the vote for Democrats. Those are the same organizers who would be crucial to a Harris victory in the state, where Donald Trump is currently ahead by only 1 percentage point in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.

But just a few miles up the road, another much smaller rally was taking place. Close supporters of Devin Barrington-Ward gathered on the steps of Atlanta’s City Hall to back his bid for the recently vacated at-large seat on city council. The race is noteworthy not only because it’s happening concurrently with a presidential election, but also because it hinges in part on an issue that Atlantans have been fighting over for the last three years: Cop City.

Barrington-Ward, a local activist and managing director of Black Futurists Group, is the only candidate who is vocally opposed to Cop City, a $109 million proposed police training facility that city officials — led by Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens and the city council — rammed through despite widespread protests from Atlanta residents. The issue came to a head last year, after organizers with the Stop Cop City coalition collected 116,000 signatures for a ballot referendum vote on the project, only for city officials to tie the referendum up in litigation and plow through with the project anyway.

“We can never repair the damage that was done when the city decided to repress the votes of 116,000 people,” said Barrington-Ward on Saturday. “It is a public safety issue, right, that I think the Stop Cop City movement tapped into, but more importantly than that, it’s a democracy issue.”

This impact of the referendum movement and the city’s subsequent efforts to subvert the democratic process run far deeper than a single city council race. Critics of the police training facility argue that in an election where every vote counts, local Democrats’ decision to burn the goodwill of 116,000 voters could have national consequences — in large part because the city’s actions effectively sidelined the countless volunteers who would have helped to get out the vote for the referendum if it were on the ballot.

The referendum could have been an “olive branch between liberals and the left that allows us all to win and to create a scenario in which it is plausible that we can all play on the same team,” said Paul Glaze, a spokesperson for the Stop Cop City referendum campaign. “But I can’t go back to my people without something to show for it.”

Direct Democracy, Thwarted

In the summer of 2023, organizers put in countless hours in the blazing Atlanta heat, door-knocking and collecting signatures to get a referendum on the ballot for voters to weigh in on the development of Cop City. Critics of the project articulated a series of concerns ranging from its environmental impact to the roughly $30 million in public funding its construction required — money they argued would be better spent on numerous other endeavors, including addressing the city’s massive racial wealth gap.

In the end, organizers collected over 116,000 signatures. To put that into perspective, that’s over 37,000 more people who voted in the last Atlanta mayoral election and well over 100,000 more people than the margin Democrats won the state by in 2020.

Despite crossing the necessary threshold, city officials claimed that organizers had not only missed the deadline, which was extended by a federal court but appealed by the city, but also that ballot initiatives can’t overturn city ordinances. Stop Cop City advocates immediately cried foul, arguing that this was a direct attack on democracy and the rights of the tens of thousands of city residents.

The litigation over the referendum remains pending, yet the city has continued to develop the project, in what many have called an attempt to run out the clock on voters getting a say.

There is overlap between the organizers who knocked on doors for the Cop City referendum and those who helped elect Democrats in 2020, in the wake of the racial justice uprising, said Glaze.