On September 21, Washington, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray appointed three new members of the District of Columbia Board of Elections. However, one of his nominees, Robert L. Mallett, does not meet the city’s duration of residency requirement. That law requires members of the Board to have lived in the District continuously for the previous three years. Mallett does not meet that requirement. See this story.

City councilmember Mary Cheh said Mallett “could always petition for an exception.” D.C. also requires candidates for District of Columbia presidential electors to have lived in the District for the preceding three years, a law that has made it difficult for some minor parties in the past to field a slate of presidential electors. D.C. also does not permit petitioners to work in the District if they are not residents.

D.C. officials seem to have a propensity for ignoring election laws that are inconvenient. In 2010, initial election results showed that no Republican nominee for districtwide partisan office had polled as many as 7,500 votes. The D.C. Board of Elections then re-interpreted the law on how a party remains ballot-qualified, which on its face appears to require a party to poll 7,500 votes every two years. The D.C. Board said that because John McCain had polled more than 7,500 votes for President in the District in November 2008, that was good enough to extend the party’s status for four years, not just two years, and that therefore the party was still ballot-qualified. When the final returns were compiled, however, it turned out that the Republicans had polled more than 7,500 votes for one office in 2010.