jonetta rose barras: Slouching toward the DC general election with controversy 

The promise ranked choice voting (RCV) proponents made nearly two years ago was that new people would get elected to more offices with more votes. If the June primary is any indication, that was all talk.

For the most part, the winners in the Democratic primary could be called the usual suspects: current or previous DC councilmembers, or other officeholders, including present or past members of the District’s statehood delegation, who technically are lobbyists but front as congressional officials wearing the titles of shadow representative and shadow senator.

Should District residents expect similar results in the general election? Probably.

Consider, as an example, the at-large council race. The three party nominees — Republican Darrell Green, Statehood Green Party member Darryl Moch and Democrat Oye Owolewa, who currently serves as DC’s elected shadow representative — are all known in the local political class. 

Nine other individuals, all registered as independents, picked up petitions from the DC Board of Elections earlier this summer, hoping to qualify for a place on the November ballot. They were required to submit the valid signatures of no less than 3,000 duly registered DC voters.

Two of the nine had formally withdrawn from the race by Aug. 3. Of the seven remaining candidates, Joseph Jackson, Nina Taylor, Danielle Urey and Councilmember Elissa Silverman filed their petitions by the Aug. 5 deadline. Silverman has indicated that she submitted 4,000 signatures with the help of 80 volunteers.

Silverman returned to the legislature last month, after winning the special election to fill the remaining months of former Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie’s term. To serve a full four years, she has to win in November. Before she lost her 2022 reelection bid, Silverman had served eight years on the council.

What is the probability of one of the lesser-known contenders emerging victorious over Silverman and Owolewa? How will implementation of ranked choice voting affect the dynamics?

During recent interviews with Elections Board officials and some RCV experts, I was told that the same tabulation system used in the primary will be deployed for the pick-two at-large council race. 

A voter’s top-ranked candidate will count in the initial tabulation. If a voter has the winner of that initial round ranked first, their ballot will be put aside at that point. Thus, even if that voter has selected a second candidate, their ballot will not be included in any subsequent rounds. 

Put plain and simple, tens of thousands of votes, many of them from Democrats, will be suppressed when it comes to deciding the winner of the second at-large seat up for grabs on the November ballot.

Instead of more votes, RCV may lead to fewer votes, to say nothing of a break with the Home Rule Act and decades of election practice and tradition.

Equally disturbing and controversial, it appears that the Democratic mayoral nominee, Janeese Lewis George, may enter the final leg of the 2026 political contest with a major, unresolved local campaign finance violation hanging over her.

In June, the DC Office of Campaign Finance (OCF) found that Lewis George and her campaign had had “improper coordination” with the union-organized and -funded Safe & Affordable DC, which presented itself as a super PAC-style group known as an independent expenditure committee. (District law prohibits interaction or collusion between a candidate and an independent expenditure committee.) 

OCF also found that Lewis George’s campaign had not documented all of its expenditures accurately. Further, it failed to comply with certain Fair Elections Program rules.

In an order signed by the agency’s director, Cecily Collier Montgomery, Lewis George and her campaign were assessed penalties totaling $16,000. Safe & Affordable DC was fined $4,000. 

Those fines have not yet become effective, as both respondents are in the process of appealing the order. 

Amazingly, Lewis George is being allowed to continue to draw money from the publicly financed Fair Elections Program. Since being certified earlier this year, she has received nearly $3 million of taxpayers’ money for her political operation — the one accused of breaking the law.

Wesley Williams, OCF operations and policy officer, did not answer questions I asked him via email about why Lewis George’s certification for the program was not revoked. 

In June, when Jackie Reyes Yanes, a Ward 1 candidate in the Democratic primary, was accused of filing a false contribution report, she was immediately dismissed from the Fair Elections Program. She was also ordered to return all unused funds.

Should Reyes Yanes be held to a higher ethical and legal standard than Lewis George, a sitting councilmember representing Ward 4?

Inexplicably, the decision to allow Lewis George to continue to spend the public’s matching funds has come even after the OCF denied the requests for reconsideration filed in June by her campaign and Safe & Affordable DC. Subsequently, both groups asked the Elections Board for a de novo hearing, denying the allegations of wrongdoing and accusing OCF of a shoddy investigation. Those hearings have not been scheduled, according to a spokesperson for the board.

It’s troubling to me that the District’s likely new mayor might begin her tenure with this ethical and legal cloud hanging over her. 

Also troublesome to me: While many people locally and nationally have rightly lambasted President Donald Trump and his Republican sycophants over their attempts to weaken voting laws in this country and suppress voters’ rights, no one seems bothered that the District apparently is poised to do something along those same lines.

“The way the [Initiative 83] legislation was written, it is no longer pick-two. It’s now the last two candidates left standing,” an Elections Board official explained to me about the tabulation system that will be used to count ballots for the at-large race in November.

Brian Strege, chair of Grow Democracy DC, an organization associated with RCV proponents, described the process as “bottoms-up.”

That is not the traditional pick-two system DC has used as recently as 2024 for the at-large race.

In a general election, voters marked their ballots for any two of the candidates running for office, although not everyone used both votes. The two individuals with the highest number of votes were declared the winners, and every voter’s ballot was included in the tabulation. 

Now, after that first vote is counted, if your preferred candidate wins, your “ballot will sit with you,” Strege told me during an extensive interview about the tabulation process.

That “sit with you” is a quaint euphemism for a form of voter suppression.

Here’s why I use that latter term: You, the voter, will be penalized because your top choice came out the winner during the first round of tabulations. Never mind that you also chose a second candidate; your ballot will not be counted again during any subsequent tabulation rounds in the at-large race. 

If that process were used by Republicans in a so-called red state, Democrats would be screaming bloody murder. In blue DC, mum’s the word.

Actually, last month Council Chair Phil Mendelson tried introducing emergency legislation that would have used a sequential or multi-pass system. It would have required that every ballot was counted in every round.

He got slapped back by advocates who seemed worried about whether Democrats or moderate voters would end up dominating each round, perhaps preventing progressives like Silverman from becoming the second pick.

“The law has been in place since May 2025. The council could have revised it at any time,” said one RVC advocate who requested anonymity. 

Strege criticized Mendelson’s description of his bill: “It wasn’t a clarification. It was a wholesale change.

“Whether or not you agree with the bottoms-up system, it was an intentional choice. It’s a functional one,” added Strege.

The council is out on summer recess. I wasn’t able to reach Mendelson for comment. He previously told me he withdrew his proposal in large part because it lacked the necessary nine votes.

“There is a way [to tabulate votes] to get closer to voters recognizing the pick-two” system they are accustomed to, an election official told me. “We don’t necessarily have a say in the law. We had no input in [Mendelson’s] legislation.

“[But] we will implement whatever is the law,” added that election official.

During my interviews over the past week, it seemed that election officials may have favored what’s known as the single transferable vote (STV), which involves apportioning calculated percentages of votes to candidates after the first round. That was the tabulation method that at-large Councilmember Christina Henderson included in the ranked choice voting bill she introduced in 2021. The council never voted on that proposal. RCV became law after overwhelming approval of a citizen-sponsored initiative — a measure that was flawed in my opinion.

Experts, including Strege, called STV the better system for a race involving selection of multiple candidates, such as DC’s pick-two at-large race.. 

STV involves “more math than American voters are used to,” explained Chris Hughes, who works with the RCV Resource Center. The group has offered some administrative guidance to the city’s Elections Board, but Hughes spoke with me as a private DC resident with knowledge of how the system works in other jurisdictions around the country.

He said proportional systems are used in eight cities and counties. Four of those jurisdictions — Albany, California; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Charlottesville, Virginia; and Arlington, Virginia — have used it for two-seat elections. When it was used in a 2023 primary in Arlington, the two people who won represented “both wings of the party,” according to Hughes.

“The [public] education for bottoms-up is simple. My sense is that is why folks went with it,” said Hughes. “That’s the trade-off. It’s not the most representative.

“You want to get more people in more seats at the table,” he added.

Strege said his group and others will implement an education campaign after the summer to help explain how RCV will work in the general election. “I don’t think it should be changed now. If they want to reopen the topic, the time to do that is in January.”

Except, by then, an at-large councilmember would have been elected using a process that involved the suppression of tens of thousands of votes. 

That sounds and feels way too Trumpian to me.

jonetta rose barras is an author and DC-based freelance journalist, covering national and local issues. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.