Former Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans withdrew from the race for D.C. Council chair April 16 after the Board of Elections found he fell short of the required number of signatures.
A BOE staff review found April 12 that while Evans had submitted 2,632 signatures — well over the 2,000 required — only 1,352 were valid because of flaws like signers not appearing on voter rolls, address mismatches and duplicate entries, leaving him 647 short of ballot qualification. Evans’ withdrawal leaves current D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson, who has held his seat since 1998 and served as chair since 2012, as the sole candidate in the race for the District-wide seat.
Evans said in an interview he expected to win the race and was “surprised” by the BOE’s determination that his signatures were invalid. Evans said the people he deployed to gather his signatures were not doing their job properly, which resulted in the invalid entries.
“It was clear to me that we just didn’t have them, so I would not have been certified,” Evans said. “So I withdrew.”
Evans said because he had a small campaign he did not have the resources to check the validity of each signature, and in his time in public office he has seen mistakes in petitions before from candidates that were allowed to remain on the ballot. He said he finds it “unfortunate” that Mendelson will run unopposed, depriving constituents of discourse between candidates.
“My argument is they should have erred on the side of keeping people on the ballot, not kicking them off the ballot,” Evans said. “That’s a fair approach, but they didn’t see it my way.”
Evans faced three challenges to the validity of his signatures prior to his expulsion, one from Mendelson’s former campaign manager Eric Rogers, one from D.C. mayoral candidate Ernest Johnson and one from ANC 5F06 Commissioner Joe Bishop-Henchman.
Evans said he withdrew after BOE’s general counsel told him at pre-hearing conferences on April 14 and 15 the board would rule solely on whether his valid signature count cleared the 2,000 threshold and confirmed he did not have enough valid signatures for the board to certify his candidacy.
BOE scheduled a hearing to discuss the challenges for April 17 that would have taken place if Evans continued his campaign. Bishop-Henchman wrote in a presentation he planned to give to the BOE at the hearing that some petition sheets contained clusters of entries in the same handwriting and one page’s names appeared to match real addresses but had the wrong last names.
Johnson said he filed the challenge, which he said included “serious concerns” about Evans’ compliance with D.C. law, to “ensure the integrity” of the ballot access process, but ultimately decided to withdraw it to avoid forcing the BOE to address duplicate challenges.
“After the registrar’s report and in light of additional challenges filed by other parties that ultimately addressed the threshold issue, we made the decision to withdraw our challenge,” Johnson said.
Evans tried to stifle Rogers’ challenge earlier this month, claiming Mendelson violated D.C. campaign law by printing forms related to the challenge at his council office. But the BOE upheld the challenge, finding Rogers filed the document properly. Evans said he filed complaints with the Office of Campaign Finance, the BOE and the U.S. Attorney’s Office over the printing.
The Office of Campaign Finance confirmed it opened an investigation into the printing in a letter it sent to Evans. Evans said Mendelson’s conduct constituted a willful violation of D.C. law, which should have led the BOE to throw out the challenge.
“He willingly and knowingly used his council office for campaign purposes, which is a criminal law violation,” Evans said.
Mendelson and Rogers did not respond to requests for comment.
Evans announced a comeback bid for Council chair in January, six years after resigning from the Council amid an ethics investigation into his use of a private consulting firm he founded while in office to solicit clients with business before the Council, and his use of his Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority board chairmanship to push out a parking contractor while collecting $50,000 a year from its competitor.
Evans served on the Council from 1991 until 2020, representing Ward 2 neighborhoods that include Foggy Bottom, the West End, downtown and Georgetown.
Federal investigations into Evans never led to criminal charges, but a D.C. Council investigation found he had received $400,000 and did not properly disclose his clients, which led the body to unanimously vote to recommend his expulsion in 2019.
Evans said when his campaign launched he wanted to restore discipline to the Council by strengthening agency oversight and reining in spending while pursuing what he called a more “strategic” approach to protecting the city’s home rule as President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans implement policies and pass laws encroaching on D.C.’s autonomy.
The Democratic Primary is set for June 16.
