FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Council Communications
Atlanta City Hall
55 Trinity Ave. SW
Atlanta, GA 30303

August 21, 2023

City of Atlanta Outlines Verification Process for Atlanta Public Safety Training Center Petition

ATLANTA — City of Atlanta officials today outlined the process they will use to verify the petition lines that have been collected by citizens who are advocating for a referendum on the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. To unequivocally ensure the integrity and the security of the verification process, the Office of the Municipal Clerk has engaged City Clerk Emeritus Foris Webb III to help supervise the process.

“In an effort to ensure that adequate resources are dedicated to this project, the City of Atlanta - through the adoption of the Atlanta City Council - has developed a step-by-step process to conduct the audit of the documents, of which the signature verification process maybe a critical element,” said Interim Municipal Clerk Vanessa Waldon. “We are committed to a transparent process that meets the requirements of the law and builds public confidence and trust.”

The process used by the Office of the Municipal Clerk will entail four (4) steps with the guiding principles of conducting the process in a manner that preserves the ability of the public to participate in the democratic process, maintains the integrity of the verification process, the accuracy of the results, and a commitment to transparency.

1. Petition Intake Process. When the petition is presented to Interim Municipal Clerk Waldon, she will affirmatively establish how many boxes of signature pages have been turned in, and seal them in front of the petitioners. She will then take the sealed boxes to a secure vault in the Clerk’s office, where they will be kept secure until they are scanned.

    

2. Scanning/Processing. Once received, the boxes will be individually opened, and their contents scanned to create an electronic image of every page. While the petition pages that were issued have unique, sequential numbers on the bottom, we do not presume that we will receive them back in perfect numerical sequence – there may be gaps, for instance, or overlap between the sequences present in different boxes. Accordingly, the City will create individual designations for each page in each box, so that every page that is turned in will have a unique designation. The petitioners will be provided with a copy of those electronic images once they are created, and the Office of the Municipal Clerk will provide a full copy of the scanned documents to the media. Members of the public at large can request a digital copy through an email address which will be provided online. Additionally, a searchable database will be created, which will be accessible to the general public at large. The originals will be kept secure as well.

    

3. Review/Verification. Once individually designated and scanned, the completed lines will be reviewed to determine a) whether the name and other information present identifies and corresponds to a uniquely qualified Atlanta voter, and if so, b) whether those signatures match that of the unique voter. This will be a manual process, a line-by-line review, which will also include double-checking of each line and other quality control measures. The review will rely on the official state voter registration database. Petition lines that do not pass the verification process will have detailed documentation as to the reason for the non-verification status.

    

4. Additional Public Comment/Inquiries. To maintain the integrity of the verification process and consistent with prior City of Atlanta procedures and practices regarding petition verification, the City will not comment on the review once the verification process begins. Once the process is complete, all submitted pages will be available under the Georgia Open Records Act for the public and the city will resume dialogue.

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Office of Municipal Clerk:
(404) 330-6032