ICYMI:  Effort to Recall CM Charles Allen Fails

ICYMI:  Effort to Recall CM Charles Allen Fails

by Larry Janezich

Posted August 13, 2024

ICYMI:  Effort to Recall CM Charles Allen Fails

Organizers of the effort to recall CM Charles Allen acknowledged on Monday that they had failed to get the minimum number of 6425 signatures on the recall petition.  They came up some 900 votes short.  In reality, they needed at least another 1,000 on top of that to be safe from challenges to ineligible or illegible signatures.  And Allen had a team of volunteers ready to check.   

The recall organizers listed a number of reasons for the failure, including citing the unavailability of a mobile application which they claimed the Board of Elections was supposed to provide them to help get signatures.  It would have allowed signees to sign an iPad instead of a piece of paper – but BOE had discontinued the app after 2022.  They also cited aggressive challenges by the pro-Allen organization Neighbors United for Ward 6, headed by former Ward 6 council member Tommy Wells.  Wells filed campaign finance complaints with BOE related to the organizers’ fundraising methods, citing illegal coordination between the campaign and independent expenditure committees and irregularities in employment information provided by campaign contributors.  Also cited was advertising in support of the recall by the DC Police Union without filing as a campaign contributor. 

There were good reasons that the recall effort failed.  Initially, the effort – while it was centered on Capitol Hill – seemed to have considerable momentum.  Once the low hanging fruit of petition signers had been picked, the effort seemed to fade.  There seemed to be little effort in other parts of Ward 6 such as The Wharf or near Northwest. 

Some Ward 6 residents were put off by the involvement of Republicans in the effort amid news reports of national GOP politicians pointing to the recall as evidence that DC was a liberal city which could not govern itself.  A considerable number of large donations came from Republicans and – according to a source familiar with the recall campaign – the DC Republican Party sent petitions and return envelopes to 6000 Republicans in Ward Six. 

And then there’s this:  Allen is popular in Ward 6 and most residents feel they are well represented.  They were not willing to single him out as being responsible for the increase in violent crime that plagued the city in 2023 – the genesis of the recall movement. Three months after the launch of the recall, crime was trending downward in 2024 even before the City Council passed the Secure DC Crime Bill in March.  In the first half of this year, DC has seen one of the steepest drops in violent crime among major U.S. cities. Organizers of the recall built the movement on the crime wave – but offered no solutions of their own, defaulting to a position of supporting more arrests, more convictions, and more incarcerations.   

See also: 

Editorial Part I: What’s Behind the Recall Charles Allen Campaign?  https://capitolhillcorner.org/2024/03/20/editorial-whats-behind-the-recall-charles-allen-campaign/

Editorial Part II:  What’s Behind the Recall Charles Allen Campaign?  https://capitolhillcorner.org/2024/03/21/editorial-part-ii-whos-behind-the-recall-charles-allen-campaign/