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Slots campaign fails
Proponents pledge to fight on in court
(Published August 9, 2004)

By MICHAEL HOFFMAN
Staff Writer

The D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics ruled Aug. 5 that proponents of a video slots initiative failed to gather the required number of valid signatures to place the measure before voters this fall.

But advocates of the initiative, which would allow a gambling emporium to operate in Northeast Washington without competition for 10 years, vowed to continue their fight in court.

"The next step is the D.C. Court of Appeals," said lawyer John Ray, a former at-large D.C. councilman who represents D.C. businessman Pedro Alfonso and others who are promoting the gambling measure.

Ray said he will challenge the elections board’s ruling on Aug. 3 that invalidated all petition signatures collected by workers for Star and Stripes, a Florida-based company hired by proponents to help pass petitions during the Fourth of July weekend.

Alfonso called the board's decision to keep the initiative off the ballot a loss for D.C. voters who signed the slots petition "in good faith" and said it robbed D.C. residents of the ability to control their own future.

"The District’s citizens have become disenfranchised because of this issue," he said. "The way you get rid of fraud is by punishing those who did it, not by punishing disenfranchised voters."

On the other side, the mood was strikingly different among those who formally challenged the legality of proponents’ signature gathering process.

Lawyer Ron Drake termed the board's ruling "a victory for the city." Dorothy Brizill, executive director of the nonprofit government watchdog group DC Watch, said the ruling showed that the District doesn’t need Congress to help it deal with its own problems.

"This ruling shows that if there is a dirty house in the District, we can take care of it," Brizill asserted.

During a special meeting of the elections board on Aug. 5, Chairman Wilma A. Lewis said the petition circulators "attempted to turn the laws of the District on its head" with their signature-gathering tactics.

The board ruled that proponents fell 2,912 signatures short of the 17,599 valid signatures needed – equal to 5 percent of the District’s registered voters – to place the measure on the Nov. 2 ballot. The 14,687 signatures that were ruled valid also fell short of a requirement that proponents gather signatures from 5 percent of registered voters in at least five of the city’s eight wards. They accomplished that feat only in Wards 4, 5 and 8.

The board cited a number of reasons why so few of the 56,044 originally collected signatures could be ruled valid. Many of the petitions were invalidated due to large-scale falsification of circulator affidavits and signatures. The board also bristled at what Lewis characterized as an effort by leaders of the petition drive, particularly those working for Stars and Stripes, to recruit D.C. residents to falsely advertise the initiative as being about "jobs, schools and health care," instead of video slots.