The backstory here is that having failed in every other attempt to block the construction of a police training center near Atlanta, opponents decided they would put the issue on the ballot. To do this they needed to gather about 58,000 signatures.

In September the group turned in what they claimed were 116,000 signatures but then the legal wrangling began. Actually it started even before that as opponents demanded that people outside Atlanta be allowed to help gather signatures even though they couldn’t sign it themselves. They were also granted an extension on the time to gather signatures.

The city said it would confirm the count using signature matching, which opponents didn’t like, and also argued that the whole process probably wasn’t legal because a ballot initiative could not be used to break a legally signed city contract. The city refused to remove forward with the count until the outstanding issues were settled, specifically whether the deadline extension should have been allowed.

All of this is now before a federal appeals court that heard oral argument last Thursday and will not try to sort out which ballots should be counted. The site Truthout, which has been completely in the corner of the training site’s opponents, reported yesterday that there is reason to worry the court may not rule in their favor.

…if the questions asked in oral argument are any indication, Vote to Stop Cop City advocates are in more danger when it comes to the question of the signature collection timeline. In oral arguments, Robert Ashe III, an attorney representing the City of Atlanta, complained the injunction’s extension of the signature collection deadline “gave them not just their cake and they got to eat it too, but they got a windfall.” Arguably, he said, if the court reverted to the original 60-day deadline, “no valid signatures were submitted by the deadline at all.”

Most likely, on the question of which signatures count, the Eleventh Circuit will rule somewhere in between what the City of Atlanta and the Vote to Stop Cop City coalition want. They could decide that the extended deadline will apply only to the four DeKalb County plaintiffs, which would mean that only Atlantans’ signatures collected within the original 60-day timeline would be counted. Or they could rule that the timeline should be restarted after the district court’s injunction, which would throw out the signatures of everyone who signed the petition during the first 35 days, effectively silencing the most committed Cop City opponents who signed the petition immediately after the initiative was announced. Or, in the worst-case scenario, the court could rule that the entire process violated state law from the start, squashing any future direct democracy movements.

If any signatures are tossed out then it’s unlikely there will be enough left to get this on the ballot. Last week the Associated Press and three other news organizations published their analysis of a sample of the collected signatures. The first finding was that there are not 116,000 only 108,500. But the more significant finding was that, after looking at a random sample of 1,000 signatures, more than half could not be verified.

If you do the math here, starting from 108,500 signatures the group would need 53.7% of those to be valid in order to reach the required number of 58,231 signatures. The actual percentage the AP verified based on the random sample of 1,000 was 47.5%.

The news organizations found nearly half of a statistical sample of 1,000 entries couldn’t be matched to an eligible registered city of Atlanta voter. Some signers live outside the city, some seemingly fabricated addresses, and others provided far too little information — like the “Lord Jesus” who signed with an address of “homeless.”…

The reporting partners analyzed a sample of 1,000 entries, taking a random sample of pages proportionally from each of 16 boxes, and then choosing a random entry on each page. Comparing names and addresses to voter rolls, the partners matched 47.5% of names to eligible Atlanta voters.

Another 5.2% of entries are uncertain — for example common names matching multiple voters, but without a matching address. Those might be found eligible using birth dates redacted from public petition copies, or through signature comparisons. They might also be found eligible if signers provide additional information, a process known as curing.

As it stands now, the margin of error in the AP count is large enough that it’s at least possible there could be enough valid signatures to put this on the ballot, but that’s before any signature matching, which the AP did not attempt. Signature matching would almost certainly reduce the number of valid signatures, making this effort a failure.

And again, that’s assuming the court doesn’t reduce the number of signatures the group is starting with, for instance by ruling that some portion of the timeline extension was wrongly decided. The loss of any significant number of signatures off the top would render this an almost certain failure. And even if by some combination of luck and sympathetic judges this gets on the ballot, there’s no guarantee it will pass. The whole thing depends on one unlikely turn of events after another.

Meanwhile, “Cop City” is being built. The Daily Mail published recent drone video showing the progress.

The aerial video shows the vast site cleared of trees with bulldozed roads and the foundations of buildings in place.

The project – which is designed to provide a training ground for emergency services – has been met by fierce backlash from anti-police and environmental activists.

Even if this gets on the March ballot, the project will be three months further along by then. Are Atlanta voters really going to block a construction project that is nearly done? I sort of doubt it.

New drone footage shows aerial views of controversial $90 million first-responder training center 'Cop City' outside Atlanta where police deployed stun grenades and tear gas https://t.co/peO9HZL7TN pic.twitter.com/OohKRcg20Y

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) December 19, 2023

I’ve said before that the moment the anti-police extremists run out of semi-legal avenues to stop this, they will return to the illegal ones instead. Specifically, opponents have used arson against construction and police vehicles in the past and have vowed “If you build it we will burn it.” I suspect that’s where this will end up. Months from now the site will be near completion and arsonists will sneak in and burn it down. If it happens you can bet there will be plenty of leftist news sites cheering them on.