Should the election results on the ranked choice voting initiative be voided?

Five months after DC voters approved the “Make All Votes Count DC” ballot initiative that could bring semi-open primaries and the controversial practice of ranked choice voting to the nation’s capital, the DC Board of Elections has finally acknowledged what it has known since Aug. 2: Leading members of the campaign committee — namely chair Lisa Rice and secretary Adam Eidinger, as well as Nikolas Schiller and Kristin Furnish — violated DC’s election laws and could face “potential criminal prosecution.”

Committee members deliberately used correction fluid — Wite-Out or perhaps Liquid Paper — or correction tape to alter some data provided by 4,802 voters who signed qualifying petitions circulated by the Initiative 83 campaign committee and on its behalf. The altered information tainted 12% of the 40,000 or so signatures that were submitted.

“This practice went beyond what the D.C. Official Code 1-1001.16 and the Board’s guidance permits and violated the election laws,” according to the BOE order signed by Chair Gary Thompson and issued this week.

Neither Rice nor Eidinger returned my telephone calls seeking their responses.

“BOE knew there was fraud, and they allowed [the initiative] to be put on the ballot anyway,” Deirdre Brown, who chaired the Vote No on Initiative 83 committee, told me during an interview last week after a meeting in which the Elections Board finally took action against some of the violators.

Brown said “no one contacted me” about the April 9 meeting: “I found out after the fact.” This is despite her demonstrated interest and concerns; last year, she filed a lawsuit in the DC Court of Appeals.

In her brief, she alleged, among other things, that the Elections Board “erred by not invalidating all petition signature lines where [Wite-Out] was used; by not invalidating all petition pages by circulators where [Wite-Out] was used on the pages that they circulated”; and “by not providing a detailed accounting of which signature lines were invalidated and which signatures with the use of [Wite-Out] were not invalidated.” 

Brown said she believes the primary motivation for the BOE enforcement is that oral arguments in the court case are expected to be held soon.

Her instincts may be right, especially since the BOE makes reference to the case in its order and comes across as a bit peeved in a footnote that it has been pulled into litigation as a result.

It’s hard to take the sound of righteous indignation as anything but performative. After all, the questions about Wite-Out began in January 2024; the BOE registrar warned Schiller about changing anything on petitions in March; and the board heard at an August hearing about the full scale of the fraud. However, it wasn’t until last week that the board decided to do something. Those are not the actions of officials who are concerned about violations of the law, if you ask me.

Based on the contents of a petition verification report prepared for that August meeting by BOE Executive Director Monica Evans, it’s clear to me the BOE failed to honor the spirit or the letter of the city’s elections laws or regulations. 

In my view, the three-member panel surrendered to expedience. Consequently, it abandoned ethics and integrity, both of which are critical to the maintenance and operations of a clean and fair elections system.

The official transcript from the board’s Aug. 2 meeting includes testimony from several individuals concerned about the procedure established for the public to monitor the petition verification process. Longtime observers like Dorothy Brizill and Gaby Fraser were also appalled by what they saw.

If voter information on a petition doesn’t match what’s in the BOE records, “you cannot amend it or correct it to make it match,” Fraser said in her statement to the board. 

“Every sheet that was altered with [Wite-Out] should have been invalidated and thrown out,” added Fraser, president of the Metropolitan Women’s Democratic Club.

“In all my years monitoring the BOE — reviewing petitions [for] initiatives and referendums — I have never known of a committee that submitted petitions using [Wite-Out],” asserted Brizill, founding director of DC Watch, a government watchdog organization. “The committee must have thought they could willy-nilly use [Wite-Out] to correct names, signatures, addresses and even tamper with the affidavit of the petition sheet.”

At the meeting, Brizill asked Gary Thompson, chair of the BOE, what action he and his colleagues intended to take “to make sure it does not happen in the future.” He thanked her for her comments but never answered her question.

During an interview with me earlier this week, Brizill told me that last year she spent three days conducting research on the issue at the Library of Congress. “I could not find a single jurisdiction that allowed the use of Wite-Out or ‘correcting tape’ on election petitions or documents.”

Understanding the seriousness of the violation, the BOE could have rejected outright all petition sheets where the fraud was evident, significantly reducing the total of qualifying signatures. That had been the practice of past BOE members. 

Where is Benjamin Wilson when we need him?

I didn’t always agree with Wilson. However, his integrity during his tenure as BOE chair from 1990 to 2004 was never in doubt. When he and his colleagues were confronted with massive petition fraud, they discarded all of the affected sheets. In one famous case, their actions resulted in the then-incumbent mayor, Anthony A. Williams, being kicked off the ballot. He had to run a write-in campaign.

Thompson and his team took the easy route. They ignored the fraudulent activity of Make All Votes Count DC campaign members and greenlit the initiative for the November general election, offering the excuse that they had no choice because the proponents had met the numerical signature mandate.

Now, five months after that contest, the BOE has belatedly decided to take at least some responsibility for its previous negligence. It has acknowledged the violations perpetrated by some of the initiative leaders.

The solution crafted by Thompson’s BOE is really no better, however, than its monthslong inaction. The penalty imposed is not commensurate with the seriousness of the offense.

Following the recommendation of its general counsel, Terri Stroud, the BOE mandated that Rice, Eidinger and the other two pay a combined $37,500. Elections officials agreed to that sum as part of a negotiated settlement during a closed-door meeting in February 2025, attended by Stroud, the violators and their lawyer.

The total penalty amounted to $300 for each of 125 violations found on sheets that the four of them had distributed, according to the board’s order. It does not cover the full scope of 4,802 violations that are acknowledged in every official, related BOE document. By law, the BOE is authorized to levy a fine as high as $2,000 for each violation, which means it could have issued a penalty of $9.6 million — a far cry from $37,500.

Guilt on a charge of falsifying information is based on a standard of “strict liability,” meaning that “intent isn’t relevant,” explained Thompson during last week’s meeting. Then, interestingly, he seemed to contradict himself, adding that the violators had said they did not know using Wite-Out was impermissible.

Confession: I am no fan of ranked choice voting, although as a registered independent, the idea of open primaries is certainly appealing to me. However, my position or that of any voter on the initiative is not at issue. What should animate everyone is the need to protect the integrity of the city’s voting process and its election laws.

There are tons of questions surrounding the BOE’s handling of I-83. I asked some of them via email after the meeting last week. 

By law, petition circulators must obtain signatures from 5% of the registered voters citywide to qualify for the ballot. They must also collect signatures from 5% of registered voters in at least five of the District’s eight wards. 

The signatures from voters in Ward 8 and Ward 5 — two of the District’s predominantly Black wards — were not included in the ward-by-ward review of a random sample to determine whether the submitted signatures met the required geographic distribution. I asked why.

I also asked why the BOE ignored the previous practice of discarding entire petition sheets when fraud was discovered. Why, I wanted to know, had such a minimal fine been levied for an offense that is considered a criminal violation of the law. And why hadn’t the board moved to rescind its approval of the ballot initiative after having found the fraudulent activity?

“I-83 is currently being litigated in two cases, so the Board has no additional comments,” Sarah Graham, a spokesperson for the BOE, wrote in her email reply to my questions.

But hadn’t the Elections Board by its enforcement action confirmed at least the thrust of Brown’s allegations?

Equally disconcerting, some members of the Make All Votes Count DC committee have acknowledged, according to BOE officials and published news reports, that they had used correction fluid on qualifying petitions for previous ballot initiatives. 

Sources told me that Wite-Out was used on petitions for Initiative 82, which was the measure that led to phasing out the tipped minimum wage, and Initiative 71, which decriminalized recreational marijuana use by adults. 

The DC Council should immediately open an investigation into the BOE’s handling of these three ballot initiatives. A common thread through all of them is the involvement of Eidinger, who served as the secretary of the Make All Votes Count DC committee. He is one of the leaders of a new initiative to stop development of a stadium for the Washington Commanders football team at the RFK site in Northeast.

That odor you’re smelling is likely corruption. 

Should Stroud and Evans be terminated from their positions? Should Mayor Muriel Bowser and the council remove Thompson from the board?

This budding scandal comes as the Republican Party under President Donald Trump is aggressively attempting to restrict the voting rights of millions of Americans, including those in DC, establishing a regime that demands among other things a specialized voter identification and verification. It’s all reminiscent of racial, class and gender discrimination of the early 20th century — the kind that people in the South fought to eliminate even at the cost of their lives.

But even without Trump trying to blast us all back to the past, Thompson and his team’s handling of the I-83 petition process is wrong. DC voters should have the confidence that the letter and spirit of DC laws and regulations have been followed whenever an issue or even a candidate is placed on the ballot before them.

As someone who grew up in the segregated South and worked as a community organizer for a few years across Mississippi, I have absolutely no tolerance for anyone — whether it’s Trump or officials in a predominantly African American government — knowingly interfering with the management and operation of a fair and honest election. Too many people were killed or maimed for the right to vote.

It is a sacred thing.

This article was first published by The DC Line