[The Elias Law Group is supporting the Vote To Stop Cop City
Coalition.]
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A PROMINENT ELECTION RIGHTS LAWYER IS CALLING OUT ATLANTA’S VOTER
SUPPRESSION ON COP CITY REFERENDUM  
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Eamon Whalen
December 4, 2023
Mother Jones
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_ The Elias Law Group is supporting the Vote To Stop Cop City
Coalition. _

, Mother Jones; Jim Mone/AP, Alex Slitz/AP, Brynn Anderson/AP

 

One of the most prominent Democratic Party-aligned law firms, Elias
Law Group—led by noted election lawyer Marc Elias—has waded into
the legal battle surrounding the proposed ballot referendum for
Atlanta’s Public Safety Training Center (PSTC), better known as
“Cop City.” 

On Monday, the Vote To Stop Cop City Coalition—the organization
leading the campaign to place the building of the controversial police
training center onto the ballot for a citywide vote—sent a
memorandum to the city government with a clear message: Atlanta must
not engage in voter suppression on the referendum.

The memo includes a draft of a proposed ordinance that, if adopted,
would standardize the city’s petition review process for ballot
referendums and prevent the use of the discredited verification tactic
known as “signature matching,” according to a copy shared
exclusively with _Mother Jones_. A representative from the Vote To
Stop Cop City coalition also told _Mother Jones _that Atlanta City
Council member Liliana Bakhtiari
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will be introducing the ordinance to the council.

The drafted ordinance is supported by the Elias Law Group (ELG),
helmed by Marc Elias, one of the most prolific attorneys in the
country on voting rights litigation and threats to democracy. In the
past, Elias has advised both the Democratic National Senatorial
Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He is
the former counsel for the Democratic National Committee and the White
House under President Joe Biden. Elias’ firm oversaw Democrats’
opposition to most of the lawsuits from Trump allies attempting to
overturn the 2020 presidential election. In 2018, the _New York Times
_called
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him arguably “one of the most influential of unelected Democrats in
Washington.”

Elias’ entrance into the Cop City debate is part of a broader shift.
As activists have attempted to put the facility up for a vote, local
politicians and officials have delayed or stalled the process—using
tactics Democratic politicians have repeatedly called out in Georgia
as a hindrance to democracy
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when done by Republicans. The anti-Cop City protests have now added
another flank of support: Mainstream Democrats frustrated by
subversion of election procedures.

It means Elias’ firm finds itself aligned against an unexpected
opponent: Mayor Andre Dickens, a Democrat and member of the 2024
Biden-Harris campaign advisory
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board, along with a majority-Democrat city council. Several
high-profile Democrat and voting-rights stalwarts have come out
against Mayor Dickens and the city of Atlanta’s handling of the
referendum petition process, including former gubernatorial candidate
and state legislator Stacey Abrams, Senator Raphael Warnock, Bernice
King, and a long list
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of Georgia-based voting rights organizations. Dickens is joined in his
support for the facility by Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian
Kemp.

As I previously reported
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the referendum petition to put Cop City on the ballot was launched in
June as one of the final attempts in a multi-year movement to stop the
construction of the massive police training center. The campaign to
stop Cop City has taken on a diversity of tactics including militant
forest defense
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extensive litigation
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in court, and lobbying
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of elected officials like the city council. The repression has been
intense and widespread. Georgia law enforcement killed one protester
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in a forest raid. (The Georgia Bureau of Investigation maintains that
the protester shot first, a claim which activists vehemently refute.)
Over 60 protesters have been indicted
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on either domestic terrorism or racketeering charges that civil
liberty groups have called unprecedented
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The referendum campaign had an August deadline to collect 58,000
signatures to put the potential building of Cop City up for a vote
this November. In July, a federal judge ruled that
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non-Atlanta residents, such as those in unincorporated DeKalb County,
where Cop City is being built, were allowed to collect signatures for
the petition. (Only Atlanta residents eligible to vote can sign the
petition). This gave the referendum campaign an updated September
deadline.

Then, in August
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as the referendum campaign prepared to turn in over 100,000
signatures—well over the threshold needed to qualify for the
ballot—the city clerk of Atlanta announced that the city would use a
method called “signature matching” as part of their verification
process. Signature matching is supposedly a way to prevent fraud, in
which a voter’s signature on a ballot, or in this case petition, is
confirmed to correspond with a signature from the same voter
registered in the state’s database. But it has been criticized
widely as a method of voter suppression.

The clerk’s announcement prompted more than 25 of the leading voting
rights groups in Georgia to condemn Mayor Dickens and the city
government for using a practice typically associated with
Republicans’ attempts to disenfranchise voters. In 2018, Georgia’s
Gwinnett County was the subject of two lawsuits
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over signature matching. When the data was analyzed
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experts found that Black voters were almost three times as likely to
have their ballots rejected as white voters.

At the same time city officials announced the controversial
verification process, they simultaneously appealed
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the July decision that extended the deadline. The city’s attorneys
argued that the entire petition process was invalid. In September, the
11th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay
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halting the July decision. This put the entire referendum campaign
into a state of limbo. And it prompted Mark Cohen, the federal judge
from the July ruling, to admonish
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“the vacillating positions of the City of Atlanta throughout this
litigation.”

“The city could have avoided the conundrum that now exists,” wrote
Cohen. “But the city instead opted to approve a petition for a
referendum it believed and later contended was illegal. A proverb
dating back over four centuries ago once again applies here: Honesty
is the best policy.”

Soon after Cohen’s comments, Mayor Dickens was taken to task by
United States Senator Raphael Warnock
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who sent a stern letter to the mayor expressing concern about “how
the City decided to implement signature match.” (Dickens responded
to Warnock with an 11-page letter
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defending the city’s procedure as “best in class.”) 

The draft ordinance shared with _Mother Jones _attempts to establish a
cut-and-dry process that avoids suppression. The draft ordinance
states that a petition signature would be invalidated if the name and
other information do not correspond to a registered Atlanta voter, if
the petition was signed past the stated deadline, if the signature
entry is a duplicate of another, or if the petition is not signed at
all. In a section outlining a list of discrepancies that would _not_
invalidate a signature entry, a bullet point reads, “[if] the
signature does not appear to match the signature on record.”

This is important for voting rights advocates because, due to a number
of factors—someone recently hospitalized, someone who is disabled,
or someone for whom English is their second language—signatures may
look different enough in different contexts to be falsely invalidated.
As the ACLU wrote in 2018
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“signature match laws disproportionately impact voters already on
the margins.”

The draft ordinance also includes new rules on the public’s right to
observe the petition review and additional directions on how potential
voters will be able to “cure” their signatures if they end up
marked invalid.

“Enacting a fair, open petition review process at this junction is
critical,” said Emma Olson Sharkey, Counsel at Elias Law Group in a
statement. “The right to vote is sacrosanct and citizens petitioning
their government for direct democracy deserve to have their signatures
fairly verified and their voices heard.”

Sharkey, who specializes in ballot referendums, co-authored a report
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for Democracy Docket—a media project and database from Elias that
tracks election and voting-rights-related legal cases—arguing that
Republicans are becoming “increasingly hostile” to ballot
referendums. It specifically noted the problems of signature matching.

In the case of Cop City and the Atlanta government, the hostility
toward democracy is coming from both the Republican and Democratic
Party.

Many of the organizations that are in the Vote To Stop Cop City
Coalition and that have criticized the city’s obstructionist tactics
in the referendum process are the same organizations that helped
deliver the state to President Biden in 2020 by a thin margin. A slim
victory that Elias worked hard to prevent Trump from overturning. 

“The margin of victory in Georgia was 11,000 votes. If I’m the
Georgia Democrats, I’m freaking out. Because if they don’t put
[Cop City] on the ballot, it will have political repercussions,”
said the representative from Vote To Stop Cop City coalition, who
previously worked for a prominent Georgia-based voting rights
organization. “They’re choosing to erode democracy over this
facility.”

_Correction, December 4: An earlier version of this story misstated
the name of Marc Elias’ firm. It is Elias Law Group._

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* Cop City; Atlanta Georgia Politics;
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