The 15 members of the Atlanta City Council, including lesbian District 6 representative Anne Fauver, were sworn in to new terms Jan. 3 during inauguration ceremonies at Atlanta Symphony Hall. The gala event also included the swearing in of Mayor Shirley Franklin and municipal court judges.
Fauver, a real estate agent and the City Council’s only openly gay member, won her second term representing heavily gay District 6 by a margin of five votes.
On Wednesday, she thanked “the many members of our community” who supported her re-election and described the inauguration ceremony as “energizing” — a contrast to her 2002 swearing-in, when she was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and had been discharged from the hospital only days before.
“Far different from 2002 I am healthy. I have four years experience on the job. I am more confident than ever in my ability to deliver the best possible results for the city and my constituents,” Fauver said.
Her opponent on the Nov. 8 ballot, gay investor Steve Brodie, asked the Georgia Supreme Court on Dec. 30 to block the inauguration until his lawsuit challenging the result of the vote was resolved.
The high court rejected Brodie’s request the same day.
“The appellant’s emergency application for stay filed in this case is hereby denied,” the court ruled.
Brodie petitioned the state Supreme Court to stop Fauver from taking office while his attorneys prepared an appeal to a Fulton County Superior Court ruling against Brodie.
Judge Hilton Fuller ruled Dec. 29 that election results in the District 6 race are valid and denied Brodie’s request for a runoff.
Shortly after Fuller’s ruling was announced, Brodie pledged to appeal the decision. But as Fauver was sworn in Tuesday, he indicated in a telephone interview that he might not pursue the case further.
“I need to look at the amount of time it takes to go through the appeal process and whether that is the right thing for District 6 or not,” he said.
Brodie has 10 days from Fuller’s ruling to file an appeal. If he appealed the case to the state Supreme Court, it could take several months for a final decision, Brodie said.
But Brodie said he continued to believe the issue underlying his challenge to Fauver’s win — laws governing write-in votes — “needs to be resolved, beyond my election.”
“From a state standpoint, we need some clarity on this question,” he said.
Fauver said both the voters and the courts had spoken.
“It was a close election, but I won it and I won it three times: the original count, recount, and Judge Fuller’s Superior Court ruling,” she said. “For me this election is over and my energies are focused on the important issues facing the city. This is what my constituents want and need from me.”
A recount requested by Brodie following the municipal election confirmed that Fauver received 2,864 votes to Brodie’s 2,859. The tally was certified by the Fulton County Board of Elections on Nov. 17.
Brodie’s court petition argued it was unconstitutional for elections officials to disqualify nine write-in ballots cast in the race. If the ballots were included in the vote total, Fauver received 49.97 percent of the vote, just shy of the 50 percent plus one vote threshold needed to win without a runoff.
Georgia law requires write-in candidates to be certified as such prior to the election. Brodie also challenged the ballot design, which featured a space for a write-in candidate even though there were no certified write-in candidates in the District 6 race.
“The court finds that it is not unconstitutional as the Georgia Constitution gives the General Assembly the power to reasonably regulate write-in voting,” Fuller wrote in his ruling. “This includes the power to determine whether to compute write-in votes for majority purposes. Further, this majority requirement is statutory, not constitutional.”
In an interview shortly before the November election, Fauver said that in her first four years on the City Council, she preferred to avoid what she called “evident activism” on gay issues, instead taking a more subtle approach.
“It is a conscious choice because I think it is the way I can be most effective for our community,” Fauver said then.
She cited accomplishments including pushing the Atlanta Police Department to investigate complaints from several gay men who said an officer harassed them while arresting them for being in Piedmont Park after it closed. The officer was later fired.
After the close race with Brodie, who had chided her for an alleged lack of leadership on gay and non-gay issues, Fauver pledged to take a more visible role in her next term.
“I need to learn to toot my own horn more and work on being out front so people can see what I’m accomplishing,” she said in late November.
This week, Fauver said her “highest priorities” are to “first finalize the inclusion of domestic partner pension benefits for city employees” and “secondly, to preserve the rights of gays to adopt children.”
Gay rights advocates fear GOP lawmakers will introduce a bill to ban gays from adopting when the state legislature convenes later this month.
“Although this battle will take place at the state level, I am working very hard individually, and with others to prevent the passage of a ban … This is a very important issue for all of us,” Fauver said.
Laura Douglas-Brown can be reached at lbrown@sovo.com.
Andrew Keegan contributed and can be reached at akeegan@sovo.com.
