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Recall effort falls short
(Published August 9, 2004)

By KATHRYN SINZINGER
Staff Writer

A group of D.C. residents disgruntled with Mayor Anthony A. Williams announced July 27 that an effort to remove Williams from office has fallen short of the more than 35,000 signatures needed to place the question before voters in November.

"We are today saying to the Board of Elections, we need an extension and we will be successful," said Barbara Lett Simmons, the District’s Democratic national committeewoman and leader of the "Save Our City" recall campaign, who flew back to the District from the Democratic National Convention in Boston to make the announcement.

Simmons was flanked at the press conference by a dozen T-shirt-clad recall supporters who represented the effort’s diversity. Among those in attendance were Jerome Brocks, chairman of the Washington Teachers Union Political Action Committee; Michele Tingling-Clemmons, the D.C. Statehood Green Party’s candidate for the Ward 7 city council seat; and Cardell Shelton, vice chairman of the Ward 8 Republican Party organization.

Brocks held up a stack of petition sheets that he said contained 4,000 signatures collected by D.C. Public Schools teachers.

Simmons said the campaign collected "less than 30,000 signatures" but achieved the threshold of gathering signatures from at least 10 percent of registered voters in Ward 4 and Ward 5 – among the most solidly middle class and working class areas of the city.

D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics spokesman Bill O’Field said "there is no provision" in D.C. law for extending the time to collect signatures on recall petitions. However, D.C. law allows the recall supporters to "start all over again" with a new campaign to oust the mayor, he said.

To place the question of removing the mayor from office on the Nov. 2 ballot, the campaign was required to submit petitions signed by at least 10 percent of the District’s 354,692 registered voters – including signatures of at least 10 percent of registered voters in each of five different wards.

"This experience has been, without question, the largest citizenship education course that has been conducted in the District of Columbia," Simmons asserted about the volunteer-led recall effort.

She said petition circulators found many D.C. residents unaware that they were eligible to be registered voters, including ex-convicts and "people on unemployment compensation." Petition circulators also encountered many supportive D.C. government employees who refused to sign the recall petition in fear of retribution, she said.

"They said, ‘Barbara, I will vote for that as soon as it gets on the ballot, but I won’t sign. …I don’t want to lose my job – you know, if the man will take a low-number license tag, he will take your job,’" Simmons said.

Long the District’s elected female representative on the Democratic National Committee, Simmons criticized what she alleges was a last-minute effort led by Mayor Williams to challenge her re-election on the Sept. 14 ballot, when D.C. Democrats will elect their political party’s local leaders. Incoming mayoral chief of staff Alfreda Davis has acknowledged that city employees circulated petitions within 24 hours of the filing deadline to qualify Marilyn Tyler Brown as Simmons’ challenger.

D.C. law allows voters to recall elected officeholders, including the mayor, anytime except during the first or last year of their term in office. Williams, who was re-elected in November 2002, is currently serving the second year of his four-year term.

The campaign’s petition alleged that Williams has failed to perform adequately as mayor in the areas of health care, education, housing and public safety and that his actions have renounced home rule for the District.