Adam Eidinger may have questionable fashion sense, but he undoubtedly knows his way around a D.C. ballot initiative. So when he says backers of Initiative 83 have collected the most petition signatures in D.C. history, Loose Lips tends to believe him.
The D.C. Board of Elections has until July 31 to decide whether Eidinger and crew turned in enough valid petitions to put the election reform measure before voters. But the BOE signaled Monday that I-83’s boosters are likely to succeed. The BOE rejected a challenge from the “Vote No on 83” committee, ruling that the opponents were unlikely to succeed in blocking the initiative because of the sheer volume of signatures supporting I-83. There are many hurdles left to clear, of course, but this is perhaps the surest sign yet that voters will soon get to decide whether to simultaneously bring ranked choice voting to D.C. elections and let independents vote in party primaries.
I-83 proponents say they’ve brought in more than 40,000 signatures to support the ballot measure, which Eidinger claims is even more than he managed a decade ago during his highly popular push to decriminalize cannabis. If he’s right, that would be one heck of a strong indicator suggesting there’s some truth to what opponents and supporters alike have been whispering for months: If I-83 makes it to voters, it’s likely to pass.
“The strong coalition of voters across the District, of all backgrounds, races, classes, and political ideologies, who realize it’s time to make politicians work harder for us, and our organizing successes, especially in wards 7 and 8, show the broad support and unity we built for these reforms,” Lisa Rice, a Ward 7 advisory neighborhood commissioner and one of I-83’s lead backers, told a crowd of dozens of supporters in Navy Yard before delivering petition signatures to the BOE earlier this month.
Still, Deirdre Brown, the chair of the Vote No on 83 committee and a former Ward 3 Council candidate, tells LL that she expects to see several thousand signatures thrown out by the time everything is said and done.
I-83 proponents need signatures from at least 5 percent of all registered voters in D.C.—about 23,000 in all—as well as signatures from 5 percent of voters in five of the eight wards. The latter requirement has long been the toughest standard for ballot initiative backers to hit, particularly in east of the river communities where people feel more alienated from the city’s politics. “You can kind of tell, based on their last entries and where they were targeting” that I-83 organizers appreciated the difficulty in meeting that threshold, Brown says.
But Rice isn’t particularly concerned. She says the campaign’s goal was to collect 5,000 more signatures than they needed and they blew past that metric. Similarly, organizers aimed to collect signatures from 5 percent of voters in every single ward and they managed that, too. They claim they collected signatures from 7 percent of all voters citywide, with up to 9 percent of voters in their best-performing ward.
“I might’ve been viewed as the crazy lady on the campaign a few weeks ago,” Rice says. “But it wasn’t unexpected that we’d need a big cushion, and that’s why I demanded it.”
These initiative battles are waged on technicalities, however, and that is where the No on 83 committee is directing its focus. Even though the elections board didn’t accept its challenge, Brown is hopeful that the BOE will still take issue with one of the prime issues raised by opponents: Petition gatherers used Wite-Out to correct the names or addresses of signatories, which Brown calls a “clear violation” of D.C. rules.
Eidinger believes the anti-83 committee is being a bit misleading here. He says organizers only used Wite-Out while going through the tedious process of ensuring that petition signers also listed the address where they are actually registered to vote, the most common error cited in the petition challenge process. In one instance, Eidinger says one of the campaign’s signature gatherers moved and needed to use Wite-Out to reflect their new address. All of these tactics, he says, generally have been allowed by the BOE in the past.
But Eidinger also cautions that elections officials have been setting aside some of these pages for extra review as I-83 supporters have monitored their work, so he’s not sure where the board will fall. He is certainly heartened, however, that the No on 83 committee could only find 3,550 signatures to challenge citing Wite-Out as an issue, so he suspects to still have a “huge surplus” even if these petitions are discarded.
But I-83’s opponents still have options moving forward. They could try suing the elections board over how it managed this process—typically they’d need to wait until the BOE ruled against their signature challenge to appeal the ruling to the courts, but the situation is a bit different now that their challenge was denied. (Several politicos have observed to LL that a more sophisticated operation probably could’ve submitted a better challenge, but the committee appears sparsely staffed.)
LL can almost see the No on 83 folks crafting the grounds for a legal challenge in some of their recent public communications. Over the past week or so, they’ve repeatedly raised concerns about the fact that their volunteers have had only limited access to watch the BOE’s workers count and verify the petition signatures. Specifically, Brown claims that the board has spread its petition counters across two floors in its offices and limited where her observers can stand.
“Not being able to observe everyone, or at least a larger group of people, all at once, having to move between desk to desk or area to area, puts us in a position where we cannot fully observe that the process is being followed,” she says. The BOE acknowledged in a statement last week that this is how the counting operation has been set up. And in response to Brown, the board said, “we will continue to ensure you have access to every person working I-83.”
“Unfortunately, we do not have a single designated area that will accommodate everyone working on the validation process,” officials added in their statement.
Astute observers of the I-83 drama will recall that there’s already an ongoing legal challenge, courtesy of D.C. Democratic party chair Charles Wilson. A Superior Court judge threw out that case due to filing mistakes, but Wilson has appealed that ruling. The city is set to file its reply brief by July 22 to allow the case to move forward, but there has been a potential complication—the other named plaintiff in the case, former Council candidate and longtime advisory neighborhood commissioner Keith Silver, died last week.
“The initiative presents an extreme case because if enacted it upends the partisan election system mandated by Congress in the Home Rule Act,” Wilson’s attorney, Johnny Barnes, wrote in a June 7 brief urging an intervention from the D.C. Court of Appeals. “It is incumbent on the board to ensure that no unconstitutional initiative or one that violates the Home Rule charter is accepted.”
But if those legal arguments don’t work and I-83 makes it on the ballot, opponents will simply have to convince voters to oppose it. Polling on these issues suggests they’re broadly popular. Proponents frame I-83 as a way to “hold politicians accountable” and “stop D.C. voter suppression,” as their yard signs say. Opponents, meanwhile, have to get into the weeds of why ranked choice voting would be too complicated or why letting independents vote in primaries would dilute the votes of the most committed partisans. It strikes LL as a much heavier lift for the No on 83 side, when most voters probably won’t be read into all the details.
Accordingly, their attempts at turning public sentiment against I-83 have required some creative thinking. For one, opponents have started disparaging the backers of the initiative as “national special interest groups and dark money,” pointing to funding from national election reform groups as evidence of “outside special interest groups trying to influence D.C. politics.” This is true enough in the technical sense, but anyone hoping to use this argument is counting on voters conflating electoral governance nonprofits with the big business and charter school groups that routinely flood local elections with cash.
Another increasingly popular argument focuses on the half of the initiative that would allow independents to vote in party primaries. Even some full-throated RCV supporters harbor doubts about this change, and opponents have tried to seize on these concerns by claiming that this would rob Democrats of the ability to decide their own primaries. Philip Pannell, the longtime Ward 8 activist who is also helping lead the I–83 push, says he’s frequently heard D.C. Democrats claim that the initiative would let Republicans sneak into Democratic primaries.
“Most independents have registered as independent because they do not share the same values of the Democratic Party and therefore don’t want to be Democrats,” Brown says. “They should not get to choose who our candidates are.”
But there’s very little evidence to suggest that all 73,000 registered independents in the city would suddenly flood into Democratic primaries and tip the scales when they’re outnumbered by a roughly 5-to-1 margin. Pannell also notes that many Republicans or voters of other political persuasions are already registered as Democrats because they know that’s the only way they can meaningfully affect local elections. Opening up the primaries would simply allow people to be a bit more honest with their registrations.
“They’re constantly telling us that Republicans are leading the charge and trying to infiltrate our elections with I-83, which is remarkable given the fact that there are Republicans trying to influence our elections right now via entirely different means,” says Elizabeth Mitchell, a Democratic state committee member who has clashed with party leaders over their handling of I-83. “They’re trying to recall Charles Allen and Brianne Nadeau.”
LL also had to chuckle when a Republican congressman, Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, made it perfectly clear where the GOP stands on the initiative. He introduced a budget rider earlier this month that would ban D.C. from spending money to implement ranked choice voting. (Brown says her committee does not condone Lawler’s move, even as it opposes the initiative.) The local chapter of the GOP has also said, repeatedly, that it does not support I-83, a fact that Barnes himself noted in his lawsuit challenging it.
Much like the fight over the tipped minimum wage before it, I-83 ultimately pits the most entrenched parts of the city’s political establishment against people who don’t normally engage with local politics. That didn’t go particularly well for the establishment when Initiative 82 (and Initiative 77 before it) came up for a vote. Are average voters any more likely to listen to leaders like Mayor Muriel Bowser or Council Chair Phil Mendelson this time around?
“It takes a lot of nerve to go up against the establishment,” Rice says. “But nothing ever worth having is easy.”