The race for head of the District of Columbia Council is now down to two candidates as the D.C. Board of Elections jettisons perennial candidate Calvin Gurley.
The Board of Elections held an administrative hearing on Monday after a D.C. resident, one D. Morris Michael, filed a complaint about the validity of Mr. Gurley’s 2,677 signatures for his bid for D.C. Council Chairman.
The Board of Elections examined 1,030 of Mr. Gurley’s signatures and announced in a memorandum that 837 of those signatures were invalid — leaving Mr. Gurley 160 names below the required cut-off number for the primary ballot. The majority of eliminations were due to invalid addresses, of which Mr. Gurley could only submit six valid change-of-address forms.
In the hearing Mr. Gurley called for the Board to automatically update voter registration records for nominating petitions (such as change of addresses), citing how the Board allows voters to update their records on election days, according to the memorandum. The Board called this “novel” and “sorely misplaced”, saying it would require obtaining permission from all signatories as well as access to other regions’ voter registries.
“Mr. Gurley has just not secured the requisite number of valid signatures for ballot access and he failed to cure enough of the address changes available to him to achieve ballot access,” said, David Michael Bennett, chairman of the Board of Elections, in response to Mr. Gurley in Monday’s ruling.
D.C. election laws allow Mr. Gurley to continue his campaign as a write-in candidate. In the meantime, the race for the primaries will continue between incumbent candidate Phi Mendelson, a progressive and council member for the last 19 years, and newcomer Ed Lazere, formerly the head of the liberal think tank D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute.
— Corrected from earlier to reflect that 837 signatures were deemed invalid. A previous version incorrectly stated “that only 837 of those signatures were valid.”
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