\n\n<\/a>\nOn May 12, 2011, the Community Unification for Educational Excellence\n(CUEE) group filed the appropriate paperwork to begin a petition drive\nwith a goal of collecting enough signatures to have a referendum question\nplaced on the November Municipal Election ballot. On July 11, 2011, the\ngroup provided the signed petitions to the City of Valdosta as required\nby law.\n
The city had 50 days from the date the petitions were delivered to\nverify the information. This has necessitated manually reviewing each\nand every one of the 10,090 signatures to confirm or deny them as valid,\nregistered voters in the City of Valdosta as prescribed under the statute\nand Georgia law.\n
\nAs of July 1, 2011, according to the Georgia Secretary of State\u2019s\nOffice, as provided by the Lowndes County Board of Elections,\nthe total number of registered voters in the City of Valdosta was\n28,274. O.C.G.A. 20-2-370 requires that the petition be signed by\none-fourth of the qualified voters of the municipality. At the time the\npetition was presented and filed with the city, there were 28,274 voters\nqualified to vote in the city. This would require valid petitions signed\nby 7,068 qualified voters. According to the results of the verification\nprocess, 7,163 petitions were determined to be valid. Thus, the petition\nis certified to be valid, and the city will notify the Lowndes County\nBoard of Elections to place the question before voters of the city in\nthe November Municipal election.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
<\/a>\nA difference of 95 signatures, or 0.33% of the registered voters.\n
\nSo far,\n\nCUEE<\/a>\nhas successfully outmaneuvered\n\nFVCS.<\/a>\nWill FVCS finally stop up and either\nmount a legal challenge<\/a>\nor simply get enough voters out to vote no?\n
\n-jsq\n
\nPS:\n
\n“Shall the City of Valdosta public school system and the Lowndes County\npublic school system be consolidated by amending the City of Valdosta\ncharter to abolish the City of Valdosta’s public school system and\nmaking the City of Valdosta public school system a part of the Lowndes\nCounty public school system?”\n
\n—\ntext of the referendum<\/a> for the November ballot\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Less than one percent of the registered voters in Valdosta have made the difference between CUEE’s school consolidation petition getting on the ballot and not. According to the City of Valdosta’s website 19 August 2011:","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,1376,15,49,3305,20,1105,1106],"tags":[1487,1636,3404,8829,3472,8869,8701,1241,3916,7,1486,3410,1635,6],"class_list":["post-1616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-cuee","category-education","category-elections","category-fvcs","category-law","category-lcboe","category-vboe","tag-ballot","tag-consolidation","tag-constitution","tag-cuee","tag-desegregation","tag-fvcs","tag-georgia","tag-legal","tag-legality","tag-lowndes-county","tag-referendum","tag-schools","tag-unification","tag-valdosta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-q4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}