As the clock ticks on the 60-day deadline to obtain over 70,000 signatures needed to put a referendum for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center on the November ballot, opponents of “Cop City” hope a federal lawsuit can win them more time.

On Monday, four residents of unincorporated DeKalb County announced they’d filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia against the city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia to challenge restrictions on petition-gathering at a press conference in front of the Historic DeKalb Courthouse in Decatur. 

The four plaintiffs, Lisa Baker, Jacqueline Dougherty, Keyanna Jones, and Amelia Weltner, say the city’s requirement that any canvasser must be a registered voter in the city limits of Atlanta violates their First Amendment rights and those of all who live near the proposed DeKalb County site in the South River Forest, which is outside the Atlanta city limits, but have no say about what happens to it. 

“Even though their own community bears the immediate impacts of the training center, ecologically and otherwise, plaintiffs’ only ability to directly impact the city of Atlanta’s decision-making process is through acting as circulators of this petition,” says their lawsuit..

During the July 10 press conference, the lawyer filing the suit, Jeff Filipovits of Spears & Filipovits, said the lawsuit asks that DeKalb residents outside of metro Atlanta be allowed to collect petition signatures and that the petition deadline be extended beyond Aug. 14, “so that plaintiffs and others like them can fully participate in the political process.”

A deadline extension would help the Cop City Vote Coalition—part of the larger Stop Cop City movement—who say their challenging two-month sprint to obtain enough signatures is hamstrung by the Atlanta residency requirement for canvassers and other restrictions: Only Atlanta…