Lisa Rice (left), Phil Pannell, and Adam Eidinger
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There are all sorts of reasons not to be surprised that Initiative 83 passed handily Tuesday, but try this one on for size: D.C. voters haven’t rejected a ballot initiative since the year Loose Lips was born.
Back in 1992, it took something as extreme as a measure vastly expanding the use of the death penalty to convince District residents to vote down a ballot initiative. The electoral reforms contained in I-83, however, have appeared broadly popular from pretty much the very beginning of this campaign. And voters affirmed those early signals by delivering a resounding margin in its favor. As of the D.C. Board of Elections’ final election night update at 11 p.m., I-83 was winning by roughly 73 percent to 27 percent, a 116,000-vote margin of victory. (The BOE tells LL that there’s still a mix of Election Day and mail-in ballots left to count, but with more than 61 percent total turnout, there are likely few changes to expect.)
None of this is any guarantee that the initiative’s promised changes—the institution of ranked choice voting and the opening of party primaries to independent voters—will actually come to pass anytime soon. D.C. law forced supporters to write the measure in such a way that it doesn’t actually compel Mayor Muriel Bowser or the D.C. Council to spend money and implement these reforms. But Tuesday’s result achieves, at least, what I-83’s most fervent supporters were hoping for: undeniable evidence of the initiative’s popularity. The expected margin of victory effectively dares politicians to defy the overwhelming will of their constituents.
“I didn’t know what to expect at all,” marveled Lisa Rice, the proposer of the initiative and one of its lead organizers, in between dance moves at a victory party along 14th Street NW. “But with 72 percent across the entire city, I’m speechless.”
The size of this win is a credit to the organizing effort of Rice, veteran ballot initiative backer Adam Eidinger, longtime Ward 8 activist and top I-83 backer Phil Pannell and the rest of the initiative team. Many similar measures have failed to even make the ballot—instead, I-83’s supporters secured roughly 40,000 signatures to put this question to voters, a number that proved to be so large that the inevitable technical challenges failed to make any dent. Once it was set to go before voters, the lack of any coordinated (or well-funded) opposition helped ensure I-83 never faced any serious danger of losing. There are still multiple legal challenges pending before the D.C. Court of Appeals, but this group of activists looks to have succeeded in winning yet another initiative victory despite the full-throated opposition of the city’s Democratic establishment.
“The opposition didn’t give enough credit at all to east of the river residents, to senior citizens,” Pannell tells LL. “At this point, I can honestly say that, in the future, I will be hard-pressed to vote for anyone who opposed the initiative. I don’t care what they’re running for. It could be parliamentarian with a local Democratic organization. If you want my support in the future, the first question I want to ask is: Where were you on Initiative 83?”
There are still loopholes, of course. Bowser and other top Democrats started coalescing around another strategy as it became increasingly clear that they’d been out-organized on this subject: Delay.
I-83 supporters have been promising that these changes to local elections would be ready in time for the 2026 races. The timing would be consequential considering the offices on the ballot two years from now. There’s the mayor, Council chair, attorney general, and the at-large Council seat currently held by Anita Bonds, perhaps the embodiment of the sort of politician ranked choice voting supporters hope to unseat.
D.C.’s convoluted budgeting process means it is technically possible, albeit difficult, for Bowser and the Council to make this happen. So perhaps the easiest answer for the initiative’s many opponents among the city’s top leaders is to push this off until a lower-stakes election in 2028.
“Usually, when there’s a big change, the election to do it is the off-year election, not where you have three citywide offices, mayor, Council chair, and AG, on the ballot,” Bowser said on WAMU’s The Politics Hour Friday.
The ideas animating such a move are both practical—there will need to be robust education efforts to ensure that opponents’ predictions about seniors or low-income voters being dissuaded from participating in a ranked choice system don’t come to pass—and political. If the Council votes again to overturn a ballot initiative, lawmakers run the risk of suffering backlash from anyone angry about having their voices nullified. Even some critics of Initiative 77 balked at the optics of overturning the tipped minimum wage measure after it passed relatively easily in 2018. But a delay could help deflect some of the heat that an outright repeal would bring, as it makes for considerably fewer headlines.
“Maybe one is hoping the other won’t do something, because then it takes the pressure off that one body,” says Ward 8 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Salim Adofo, a vocal I-83 supporter, referring to the interplay between the Council and the mayor on this issue. “That’s going to be the tough part, because we’ve seen the Council overturn ballot initiatives before.”
Only a handful of councilmembers were willing to commit to funding the initiative if it passed when LL asked around the Wilson Building a few weeks ago. The hope among organizers is that a large enough margin of victory will force lawmakers to get off the fence and move it forward. Does something like a three-to-one landslide qualify? If its margin holds, it would be roughly the same as Initiative 82’s victory two years ago, which was good enough to convince the Council not overturn the abolition of the tipped minimum wage a second time.
It helps that I-83 won so convincingly all over the city. The Democratic establishment has leaned on some familiar tropes to criticize I-83, implying that it’s being pushed by gentrifying White progressives to the detriment of Black voters (particularly those east of the Anacostia River). This disregards the reality that two Black activists have served as its public face: Rice, a Ward 7 advisory neighborhood commissioner, and Pannell, perhaps the most venerated advocate for Ward 8 left in Southeast. But it still makes for a tempting narrative when good government reform groups with national connections are also among the initiative’s biggest supporters. That was blown up the moment votes were released Tuesday night. I-83 appears to have won with 70 percent of the vote in wards 5 and 7 and 72 percent in Ward 8.
“We made an investment [east of the river] early on, and some people said it was too early,” Rice says. “But I knew there was always going to be pushback that, if we didn’t win east of the river, it wasn’t going to be the right kind of win. So I pushed back against that very early and we made a heavy investment there.”
Lawmakers could always get bailed out by the appeals court, which has not accepted arguments from elections officials that a challenge to I-83 by the D.C. Democratic Party was improperly filed. If the lawsuit is allowed to move ahead and actually succeeds, that could invalidate this whole debate. It would undoubtedly be frustrating for the initiative’s backers that the court couldn’t provide an answer before the election, but past legal challenges to ballot measures have occasionally succeeded.
Until that happens, the city’s political establishment will just have to accept that voters are asking for change. The primary didn’t see any incumbents thrown out of office, but that could be more a sign of an apathetic local electorate than anything else. If a general election crowd votes so overwhelmingly for the most consequential reforms that D.C. has seen in a generation, isn’t it worth listening?
“For me, it’s one step at a time,” Rice says. “The people we really need to persuade right now, that’s the Council. That’s our next step.”