No, there’s nothing awry at the D.C. Board of Elections—it really did just lose “ethics.”
As the Post’s Mike DeBonis reports, the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics is now just the Board of Elections. As part of a new ethics law passed late last year, a separate D.C. Board of Ethics and Government Accountability is being created to monitor and enforce the city’s ethics law; former D.C. Attorney General Robert Spagnoletti was recently tapped to lead the three-person board that will oversee its operations.
As for the Board of Elections, well, it’s just going to manage elections. (The D.C. Office of Campaign Finance will keep regulating and investigating campaign finance.) It’s slowly removing “ethics” from its logo and other material, but as it explained on Facebook last week—the first place the change was formally made, as the City Paper noted—it’s trying to save money in the process:
You’ll continue to see the full “DCBOEE” tag for a while, because we are saving taxpayer funds by making the change slowly as we update and replace old materials. That and we’re still deciding on a new logo, Twitter handle and url.
As for us, well, we’ll have to retire the same logo we’ve been using for our elections-related posts.
Martin Austermuhle