Democratic Party presidential candidates will be allowed to pay their way onto the D.C. primary ballot under emergency legislation approved unanimously Tuesday by the D.C. Council.
Instead of pleading for petition signatures on the streets and outside supermarkets, Democrats will pay $2,500 each to the D.C. Democratic State Committee to get their names on the Feb. 12 ballot. The last-minute emergency resolution, co-introduced by Ward 2 Council member Jack Evans and Council Chairman Vincent Gray, was sought by the state committee.
Recommended Stories
“A lot of people like to pay the filing fee because there’s 51 jurisdictions and we’re not the biggest,” said Don Dinan, chairman of the state committee’s delegate selection process.
The Republican Party opted to go the old-fashioned route, via nominating petitions due Friday.
“We have a lot of people out there going door to door for the sake of the process,” said Paul Craney, D.C. Republican Committee executive director.
The Democratic National Committee permits the fee option in lieu of signatures, and numerous state branches have adopted it as policy. Nominating procedures are generally left up to the individual state committees, but D.C. law still requires a petitioning process overseen by the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics.
Evans and Gray also introduced permanent legislation to clear the matter for future election cycles.
“I’ll give them a bye this time, but it would only be this time,” said D.C. Council member Carol Schwartz, a Republican who has oversight of the Board of Elections and Ethics. “Circulating petitions is a very integral part of the democratic process.”
Democrats would have been required to collect 1,000 signatures of registered Democratic voters had they taken that route. Republicans are going for 1 percent of registered GOP voters, or about 290 signatures each. Rudy Giuliani is the only GOP candidate to have submitted signatures as of Monday, though U.S. Sen. John McCain, former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee have all picked up the petitions.
