Atlanta Democrats Blocked the Cop City Referendum — and Alienated a Voter Turnout Operation

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. “The reason we won Georgia in 2020 is that post the uprising, it activated a whole bunch of new voters that stayed and voted, and then the ‘racial reckoning’ flooded all the same organizations in this exact coalition with money,” said Glaze. 

Had the referendum been on the ballot, he argued, “we would have had a real success story that we could have called pro-democracy. It fits within the Atlanta civil rights milieu; it is a perfect opportunity to strengthen the civil infrastructure of this city.”

Britney Whaley, southeast regional director for the Working Families Party and a member of the Stop Cop City coalition, said that Democrats lost a “built-in turnout machine” for this year’s election by not having the referendum on the ballot. 

“The beautiful thing about the Cop City referendum campaign was that people were involved for a number of reasons. We have people who were hosting meetings at their homes every Saturday,” canvassing their neighborhoods, going to farmers markets, and hosting community gatherings, said Whaley, whose organization endorsed Harris. “It’s kind of a built-in turnout machine. If you wanted to do a thing and put it on the ballot, that would activate them.”

Hypocrisy and Apathy

Aside from losing out on potential get-out-the-vote volunteers, Whaley worries about apathy among residents who are tired of local Democrats complaining about anti-democratic tactics from Republicans and then repeating it themselves.

“When you think about the folks who are involved in and who have signed those petitions … they are tired of our two-party system as well,” said Whaley. “There are some folks who are apathetic. Yes, there are some people who are saying, ‘I really don’t like the way the Democrats are rocking in Atlanta.’”

Whaley, who has been encouraging people to show up at the polls, said she understands these frustrations.

“We’re in Atlanta, and people think of civil rights. Like Atlanta: John Lewis and C.T. Vivian, you have champions of voting rights and our ability to participate in this democracy and have our voices heard. And so in juxtaposition to that, you have the Black mayor and city council that is like … ‘We want you to have access to democracy when convenient,’” she said.

The hypocrisy doesn’t go unnoticed, said Hannah Riley, another organizer with Stop Cop City. “There were so many hours of testimony and action at city council meetings, so much really hard work gathering signatures for the referendum last summer, so much really good-faith engagement in democracy only to be met with real obstruction,” she said. “The irony is all of this was happening right after Georgia played this national role in getting Biden elected; the city of Atlanta was like swimming in all this money for democracy initiatives.”

The mayor and city council’s actions were “a master class in suppressing electoral energy and just killing any energy surrounding voting,” said Riley.

That apathy trickled down to the at-large city council race, Riley continued. “Between a feeling of being ignored on big issues like Israel’s genocide in Gaza on the national level and then this weird gaslighting from the city on a local level … I think people are feeling like their energy is better spent elsewhere.”

Crowded Field

The race for the at-large city council seat is the closest opportunity voters will have to weigh in on Cop City this election. 

Earlier this year, Keisha Sean Waites vacated her at-large city council seat to run unsuccessfully for Fulton County clerk. Waites was one of the body’s most reliably anti-Cop City votes, and the race to replace her could be seen as a vote on the future of the issue itself. 

City council elections are ordinarily held during off-cycle years, when political participation tends to be lower. The rare opening during a presidential election cycle has drawn a crowded field. Barrington-Ward, the local activist, is running against Amber Higgins-Connor, a business owner; Duvwon Robinson, a business consultant; Eshé Collins, a civil rights attorney and former chair of the Atlanta public school boards; and Nicole Evan Jones, another business owner.

In a candidate questionnaire from Capital B, Barrington-Ward was the only candidate to answer “no” to whether he would support continuing to develop Cop City. 

The Stop Cop City referendum movement is closely watching the race. “We can’t lose that seat,” said Glaze, the spokesperson for the referendum campaign. “We do believe, from a propaganda sense, that if he loses the seat, then [Mayor] Andre Dickens and the Atlanta Police Foundation will be doing victory laps.”