The D.C. Board of Elections is throwing out almost one-third of the signatures collected by the D.C. Committee to Restore Public Trust in favor of a ballot initiative that, if passed, would ban corporate donations in D.C. elections. The Board should reconsider its onerous standards for what constitutes a valid signature—these requirements unnecessarily impede direct democracy and, in this case, could shut down one of the most worthwhile initiatives being considered in the District.
When the Committee to Restore Public Trust submitted 30,000 signatures, the Board of Elections threw out roughly 9,000 of them, citing illegibility, duplicate signatures, missing addresses, or mismatched addresses. This left the group 1,726 signatures short of the 13,298-signature threshold to put the initiative on the ballot in November.
The D.C. Committee to Restore Public Trust, the group spearheading the initiative, believes that the board made critical errors in its assessment of the signatures, counting 24,500 legitimate signatures by its own estimates. “Our review finds that Initiative 70 clearly qualified for the ballot, and we expect the court will agree,” said Bryan Weaver, a former ANC commissioner who is leading the campaign.
In the case of mismatched signatures—people who listed addresses that do not correspond to their voter registrations—the Board of Elections is applying overly specific standards to qualifying signatures. As Weaver put it, “There’s definitely an element of voter intent.”
“There are 3,100 people in the District who wanted this but moved or put down the wrong address,” he told the Washington Post. “These people are in the system, they’re registered voters, but their addresses are different from what’s on file.”
Following the landmark 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the national trend has been to liberalize corporate campaign contributions. If passed, this ballot initiative would be a small step towards reversing this trend.
While the legal future of Initiative 70 is in limbo, the positive impact it would have on the D.C. political scene is unquestionable.
Currently, corporations in the District are treated the same as citizens and are allowed to contribute directly to campaigns with an $8,500 total cap per election.
Considering the relative size of D.C. political campaigns, even a small amount of corporate money by national standards can significantly disrupt a local election. In the 2010 mayoral race, only $7 million was raised between the two leading candidates, Adrian Fenty and Vincent Gray. In elections of that scale, every dollar of corporate financing can unfairly tip the scales in one candidate’s favor—to the disadvantage of D.C. residents who don’t sit on corporate boards.
As the city remains embroiled in a scandal surrounding Mayor Vincent Gray’s campaign finances, eliminating corporate contributions is an easy way to both restore public confidence in the political process and to ensure that D.C. remains a functioning democracy. that gives equal voice to all its residents.
