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As part of filing to run for ANC, the Board of Elections gives candidates the complete voter rolls. I thought it would be interesting to aggregate the data and see what it says about the make up of the Georgetown (and Burleith) electorate. Here are the results!

Total Numbers

Our ANC is broken up into eight individual single member districts (“SMDs”). The SMDs are as follow:

• 2e01 – Burleith and Hillandale
• 2e02 – The best part of Georgetown full of beautiful and smart people (i.e. northwest Georgetown)
• 2e03 – Western Georgetown above M St.
• 2e04 – Half of the Georgetown University’s campus
• 2e05 – Lower Georgetown
• 2e06 – Eastern Georgetown above M St.
• 2e07 – Northeast Georgetown
• 2e08 – The other half of Georgetown University’s campus plus some blocks just outside the gates

The map is drawn in a way to have approximately 2,000 residents in each SMD. But that doesn’t mean that they have 2,000 registered voters. It’s 2,000 residents, including those who are too young to register, non-citizens, and those that either choose not to register or keep a registration in another state. That’s just how apportionment works in this country.

So it should not come as a surprise that each SMD has fewer than 2,000 registered voters. But some of them have way less than 2,000 registered voters. You’ll not be shocked to hear that 2e04 and 2e08 (the two student SMDs) have very few registered voters. Students rarely change their registration when they attend Georgetown. SMD 2e08, which has several blocks that include non-students, clocks in at 158 registered voters, or just about 8% of the residents. But that’s huge compared with 2e04, which has just nine registered voters. That rounds down to 0% of the 2,000 resident total.

Of the other SMDs, the voter totals vary a decent amount. East Georgetown (2e06) leads the pack with 71% registration rate, with northeast Georgetown (2e07) close behind at 65%. The rest fall back a bit further with Burleith (2e01) at 61%, western Georgetown (2e03) at 57%, northwestern Georgetown at 49%, and lower Georgetown (2e05) at 46%.

The overall registration rate for all of ANC2E is about 45%. But if you take out the student SMDs it’s at about 58%. That’s pretty low compared with the rest of the city, which has a registration rate closer to 75%. I’d like to think that is mostly due to how many international residents we have here. But I fear it also reflects a level of apathy that many residents have towards voting in DC.

Registration Date

The rolls also list when each voter first registered in DC (with a big caveat I’ll get to below). This is not necessarily the date when you first registered to vote anywhere. Just when you first registered to vote in DC. (I’m not sure what date it would list if you registered in DC, Moved away and registered there, and then registered back in DC. I assume it’s the more recent date, but it’s probably not a hugely common situation.)

Aggregating the data together, you can see what the median registration date is for the whole ANC and each of the respective SMDs. While the registration rates varied quite a bit across the SMDs, the median registration date is fairly close, at least among the non-student SMDs. They are as follow:

• 2e01 – 1/8/2016
• 2e02 – 9/15/2016
• 2e03 – 4/13/2016
• 2e04 – 2/25/2022
• 2e05 – 11/8/2016
• 2e06 – 2/12/2016
• 2e07 – 1/3/2017
• 2e08 – 7/19/2022

Not surprisingly, the median date that voters in the student districts registered is fairly recently, both coming just before the last election. But for the rest of the SMDs, the dates all fall within the twelve months starting on January 2016.

I was going to list the approximate date of the voter with the oldest registration in the ANC, but then I ran square into DC’s unfortunate history with democracy. You see, I noticed that the oldest dates I was finding were all in early 1968. That didn’t seem right, but then I remembered that after the end of Home Rule in the late 19th century, there would be no reason to register in DC before the passage of the 23rd Amendment in 1961.

This amendment gave DC residents the right to vote in presidential elections, but other than the presidential election, they still had no other elections to vote in. So the earliest a (still living) District resident would have registered in DC would be sometime ahead of the 1964 election. Perhaps the data from that election is no longer available. But 1968 was a big year for DC voters. This was obviously the second presidential election they could take part in, but it also was the first year of the elected school board. This was the first local election that District residents could vote in since 1874. (As argued in the book Dream City, a great deal of DC dysfunction in the late 20th century can probably be blamed on the fact that the city was denied democracy for 100 years).

So some of the voters with 1968 registrations probably voted in the 1964 elections, but regardless of age, no one, regardless of age, registered in DC prior to 1961.

Party

Each voter’s party identification is also listed. If you suspect that Georgetown is more Republican than the rest of DC, you’re not wrong.

Approximately 5% of District voters is registered as a Republican. But in our ANC it’s 13%.

And the Democratic portion is reflectively lower. For DC-wide it’s about 77%. In our ANC it’s 62%.

Independents are also more common here. For DC the total is 16%, but in our ANC it’s 24%.

There are fewer than 100 voters here registered with the Statehood Greens, the Libertarian party, or “other”.

The party breakout for each SMD (except the student ones) is largely similar to the overall numbers. West Georgetown (2e03) has the highest Republican percentage (15%) but northeast Georgetown (2e07) has the highest number of Republicans, with 184. But it also has the highest percentage of Democrats, at 66%.

Lower Georgetown (2e05) has the highest percentage of independent voters, at 27%.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• The Riggs Bank dome is getting repainted!
• Apero won Wine Program of the Year at the RAMMYs.

One of the best pieces of advice I got when I ran for ANC was from a former commissioner who served for many terms. He told me to not put the year of the election on my posters so I can reuse them. With that in mind, I’m dusting off my pile of campaign signs and running for reelection for ANC 2E02!

I have really enjoyed my term so far, and I hope that I have served my constituents well. My main priorities when I ran were as follow: Constituent services, pedestrian and traffic safety, and commercial revitalization. I believe I have made significant progress on each of these priorities and I will continue to hold them close to my heart if I am reelected because there is still much work to be done.

I plan to pick up my ballot petitions this week and will be around the neighborhood seeking signatures. So I many be knocking on your door soon!

Photo by Sidney Lawrence.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• The New York Times checks in on the Ein/Katharine Graham house saga.
• How Barnes and Noble will be different when it (eventually) reopens.

Mr. President, when will you #BringThemHome?

That's the question we ask of @POTUS in our refreshed mural in Georgetown.

Come see for yourself how long some of those timelines are. How much of their lives our loved ones have lost. All the milestones they missed. pic.twitter.com/dXF4d0dl7s

— Bring Our Families Home Campaign (@BOFHcampaign) July 17, 2024

The hostage mural painted alongside the former Ri Ra on M St. has been updated. This new version highlights the length of time the hostages have been detained. One hostage featured has been captive since 2007.

A previous version of the mural was erected two years ago.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• New Prix Fix restaurant above Apero that is currently taking inspiration from….Quentin Tarantino??
• There was a stabbing near the Safeway yesterday. Early reports indicate it was an argument that got out of hand. In other crime news, there was a robbery on O St. near 30th in the middle of the day on Tuesday.

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m visiting one of the quintessential commercial pockets buried deep in the Georgetown neighborhood. This particular pocket is the 1200 block of 36th St. It comes from the DC Historical Society archives.

The information with the photo states that it comes from February 1965. And that should help us identify some of the shops on this stretch. Just to the left of the center of the photo is Wisemiller’s Deli. Even at 1965, Wisemiller’s was already a stalwart, having opened twelve years earlier.

Moreover, the 1789 Restaurant and the Tombs were also open by the mid 60s. But their sister bar, F. Scott’s, was not open by 1965. According to the Post archives, a barber shop occupied 1234 36th St. (the north half of what would become F. Scott’s). The other half of what would become F. Scott’s was already a restaurant, as you can see when you zoom in:

The restaurant was named Tehaan’s (which is sometimes mistakenly spelled “Tehan’s”). It operated at this location starting in 1911, according to this matchbook:

Here is a story retold to the Washington Post in 2009 about the place (and the restrictive DC liquor laws at the time):

How can one forget the place where he had his first beer? I’ll never forget where my friends and I gathered: Sam Tehan’s on 36th Street in Georgetown (next to what is now the 1789). Ernestine, our waitress, made sure we were well taken care of and, as one of our group after devouring two cheeseburgers and a large plate of fries would say, “Once around again, Ernie.”

It was my freshman year at Georgetown, and I spent frequent evenings with my classmates at Tehan’s. On one of those evenings, after consuming several glasses of draft beer while listening to repeated playings of Jo Stafford’s rendition of “You Belong to Me” on the jukebox, I stood, in a burst of youthful exuberance, to propose a toast. Before I could utter a word, nearly everyone in the place shouted, “Sit down! You can’t stand up with a drink in D.C.”

Puzzled but chastened, I shrank back into my chair, where it was then explained to me that there was a District law prohibiting anyone other than bartenders and servers from standing or walking while carrying an alcoholic beverage. I never felt quite so much like the newcomer from Ohio that I was.

— Jim Smith, Potomac

That leaves the rest of the block between Wisemiller’s and N St. As far as I can tell, this whole building was operated as the Georgetown University Shop, which specialized in clothes for college students:

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Nice profile of the Opportunity Shop, The Lantern Bookshop and Dog Tag Bakery.
• Amazing what you’ll find (and who you’ll find out about) at an estate sale.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• What went down at our last ANC Meeting.
• The Georgetown Pantry business I was curious about is seeking a license to sell beer and wine on a retail basis. So maybe a small grocery type store?

On July 3rd, the ABC Board issued two orders directed at unlicensed pot shops in Georgetown: HotBox (at 1564 Wisconsin Ave.) and Smoke Island (at 1326 Wisconsin Ave.). The orders were cease and desist orders demanding the shops stop selling cannabis products.

As mentioned above, both these shops are unlicensed. Up until recently, all pot shops were unlicensed. But the city made a shift towards legalizing the commercial sale of cannabis under the ambit of the medical cannabis program. It has begun issuing retailer’s licenses for this purpose. But, as anyone can see, we have a large number of shops that opened before this new regulatory regime. They operated in a gray zone with a tenuous legal status. Now that the city is standing up a genuinely legal regime, the plan was that these gray market shops would either get a license or shut down. (For a much more detailed explanation of all this, please see my constituent update from last May.)

A surprising (to me, at least) number of unlicensed shops simply did not apply for a license. But there could be lots of reasons. The biggest reason is probably that they can’t get a license if they’re located within 300 feet of school or rec center (or within 400 feet of another Cannabis retailer that got their application in first). Also some might not think they can pass the license review process. Or they don’t want to source their cannabis from growers based in the District (as the new law requires).

In any event, many did not apply to get a retailer’s license. Earlier this year, ABCA (the regulatory arm of the ABC Board) was given legal authority from the DC Council to go after these shops. They have taken a deliberative approach to exercising that authority. While I would love quicker action, I certainly appreciate the agency taking the time to do it right.

In line with this deliberative approach, in March ABCA issued warning letters to six unlicensed shops in Georgetown warning them against selling pot without a license. While the agency did not share the names of these shops, I will note that several unlicensed shops have closed in the last six months.

But these cease and desist orders should amp up the pressure on the hold-outs. HotBox was an especially egregious case. It opened this location months after the city decreed the gray market shops to be no longer allowed. It opened at a location that is too close to Volta Park Rec Center to ever get a license. And worse of all, based on reports I received, the pot smoke generated by the store was so bad the patrons to Los Cuates downstairs were getting up a leaving.

I should note that the orders do not command the shops to actually close. I don’t believe ABCA has that authority. But the orders tell the shops that they can’t sell cannabis anymore. Since that’s basically the whole point of these shops existing, it should lead to them actually closing. Moreover, ABCA is working closely with other agencies, like DLCP and MPD, to ramp up the pressure if the shops ignore the orders.

For the last year, whenever people have complained to me about the pot stores, I have been counseling patience. The days of the skeezy gray market pot shops will end. They will be replaced by far fewer, but much cleaner and well regulated shops. Ultimately I think there will be about 4-5 of these shops across all of Georgetown. That compares with the nearly two dozen we’ve had at some points.

But it will take time. These orders are evidence to me that ABCA is still moving forward with the plan. In that they have my strong backing.