D.C. voters will soon get to decide whether to completely overhaul the structure of local elections—as long as the courts don’t get in the way.
The D.C. Board of Elections voted unanimously Friday to allow Initiative 83 on the November ballot, certifying that enough of the roughly 40,000 signatures submitted by organizers were valid. The vote sets the stage for a three-month sprint to the finish as District politicos debate some of the most consequential changes to local elections since the advent of Home Rule. If passed, the ballot initiative would implement ranked choice voting in D.C. contests and open party primaries to independent voters.
Of course, Loose Lips knows better than to discount the influence of the courts in a case such as this. The D.C. Democrats and party chair Charles Wilson are appealing their previous court loss, and the initiative’s other opponents could always try another avenue if that fails. Legal battles over controversial ballot initiatives aren’t anything new in D.C.
But, for now, supporters of I-83 can count this as a major victory in their push to reform the District’s elections. D.C. imposes strict requirements for collecting petition signatures. I-83 organizers needed signatures from at least 5 percent of all registered voters in D.C. (about 23,000 in total) as well as signatures from 5 percent of voters in five of the eight wards. And those petitions also needed to survive the board’s review for any mistakes and challenges from opponents.
I-83 cleared the bar with a bit less drama than the last initiatives backed by Adam Eidinger and his crew of signature gatherers: the tipped-wage ballot measures Initiative 71 and Initiative 82. Unlike in those cases, I-83 breezed through the BOE’s approval process after the board ruled that the Vote No on 83 committee couldn’t even find enough signatures to challenge to invalidate the effort.
But No on 83 leaders, particularly chair Deirdre Brown, have argued that the board should’ve discounted petitions where signature gatherers used Wite-Out to update the addresses of signatories. Eidinger has claimed this is a common practice to ensure that people who signed petitions have the addresses where they are registered to vote listed—as this is one of the most common mistakes made by signers—but Brown claimed more nefarious intent.
“The integrity of the petition gathering process depends on the honesty of circulators, and any pages tainted by tampering should be rejected,” she wrote in a statement before the BOE’s vote. “The use of Wite-Out opens the door to all types of manipulation by petition submitters in the future.”
Elections officials rejected Brown’s request for an emergency hearing on the matter last month, but they did ultimately agree with her premise. They ended up rejecting about 4,800 signatures due to those alterations, according to BOE Senior Policy Advisor Alice Miller, and another 2,700 due to other issues. But that still left about 27,000 signatures in six of the eight wards deemed valid, Miller said.
With the BOE hearing out of the way, the fight now moves to the courts. Attorneys for the city filed a brief on July 22 asking for the appeals court to summarily dismiss the D.C. Dems’ case and affirm a D.C. Superior Court judge’s ruling that the plaintiffs screwed up the process of filing it. Essentially, they say the Dems’ attorney, Johnny Barnes, jumped the gun and filed his case against the ballot initiative before the board technically allowed organizers to start gathering signatures for it.
“The elections laws are crystal clear,” the city’s attorneys wrote in the filing. They also attempted to beat back Barnes’ arguments against the initiative’s merits, though those are not the main questions they’re asking the court to consider. I-83’s backers also secured the help of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center to file a brief in support of the city’s arguments.
“The current majority political party’s resistance to changing the electoral system that resulted in their own election should not be allowed to overrule the will of the more than 40,000 District voters who want Initiative 83’s electoral reforms on the ballot,” the attorneys wrote.
There’s no telling when the court will resolve this case, or if there will be more challenges between now and Nov. 5. And there are other hurdles for supporters to clear even if this measure passes—notably, the Council would need to allocate funding to put these reforms into place—but one of the biggest dominoes has now fallen. Supporters and opponents will (most likely) now have a few months to persuade voters one way or the other, free from all this procedural wrangling.