According to the final tallies, only 96,777 people voted yesterday in Atlanta's mayoral and City Council election. That's less than 20% of the registered voters.
To make matters worse, if I had to rank the field of 12 running for mayor, my bottom two candidates won the most votes and will be facing off in a run-off election.
Keisha Lance Bottoms, outgoing Mayor Kasim Reed's hand-picked choice for successor, has been dogged for years by ethics charges and rumors. I can't tell how much is really true and how much is just political propaganda so I won't repeat the allegations here, but it seems certain that the rumors and investigations will continue into her term as Mayor if she's elected, and Atlanta has already suffered enough from political corruption in City Hall.
Mary Norwood, the one-time front-runner in the campaign, is a Republican businesswomen from Buckhead whom many in the black community fear will continue the on-going gentrification of African-American communities and drive people out from the few remaining affordable Atlanta homes. She has said that her major reason for running was to promote "safety" in Atlanta, which many people read as a code word.s for "less black people." I've already seen #anyonebutmary hashtags on Twitter and Facebook posts.
The election comes down to a choice between the lesser of two evils - an exemplar of City Hall cronyism and corruption vs. a perennial candidate who represents Atlanta's small but wealthy conservative element.
For what it's worth, I voted for Cathy Woolard, who Atlanta Magazine described as "a policy-oriented politician who’s comfortable speaking about affordability and transit—one reason why she’s picked up support from a good number of the city’s urbanists, nonprofit pros, and environmentalists." When Ryan Gravel was pushing his vision for the Atlanta BeltLine in the early 2000s, Woolard, then the president of the Atlanta City Council, was his most enthusiastic supporter, shepherding him through neighborhood association meetings to present his plan. She was the first openly gay elected official in Georgia history and was the first woman to be President of the Atlanta City Council. According again to Atlanta Magazine, during a mayoral forum that focused on Atlanta’s arts scene, she showed that she understood that a vibrant arts culture needs affordable housing just as much as canvases and stages. Unfortunately, she came in third in the election, with 17% of the vote compared to Bottoms' 26% and Norwood's 21%, or to put it another way, a little over 9,000 votes short of the frontrunner.
20% turnout. If more of the arts community, the gay community, transit enthusiasts, or just the everyday commuter stuck in Atlanta's notoriously grid-locked traffic bothered to vote, we might have had a Mayor Woolard.
20% turnout - that's why we can't have nice things.
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