Initiative 71 passed in 2014. Voters will weigh in on Initiative 77 this year. Initiatives 72-76 never made it to the ballot. (Photo by Rachel Sadon)

Initiative 71 is shorthand for citizen-approved legal marijuana. Initiative 77 has come to stand in for the bitter fight over the tipped minimum wage. But what the heck happened to initiatives 72, 73, 74, 75, and 76?

They never made it to the ballot.

It isn’t uncommon. Individuals have begun the winding process of getting a measure approved by the citizenry more than 180 times since home rule began, according to a D.C. Board of Elections master list. Only 79 ballot initiatives have even gotten to the point where they’re assigned a number, and just 19 made it all the way to Election Day before Initiative 77.

At that point, they seem to stand a better chance—13, or 68 percent, passed, including the legalization of lotteries, bingo, and raffles for charitable purposes and an epic effort to save the historic Rhodes Tavern, among others.

Not all initiatives that passed muster with voters remain on the books.

A 1994 measure, Initiative 49, to instate term limits on local politicians lasted less than a decade. The D.C. Council passed legislation in 2001 repealing the term limit law. A 2002 measure, Initaitive 62, would have required judges to let non-violent drug offenders be placed in a year of treatment instead of jail, but it was overturned in court.

And then there was the matter of a 1997 measure, Initiative 59, that sought to legalize medical marijuana. Though nearly 70 percent of voters voted in favor, it took 12 years of congressional meddling and another three years of local delays before that came to fruition.

Initiative 71, which legalized the use—but not the sale—of marijuana, had comparatively smoother sailing. After a brief tug-of-war with Congress, it took effect four months after it passed with 70 percent of the vote.

So how exactly does an inkling for a law get its way to voters?

“It’s a quirky, long process,” says DCBOE spokesperson Rachel Coll.

First, supporters submit the measure to the D.C. Board of Elections. It must include a notarized statement that the proposer is a registered voter in D.C.; he or she also must file documentation with the Office of Campaign Finance. From there, the board publishes it in the D.C. register and invites members of the public to testify.

By law, a ballot initiative can’t “appropriate funds, violate the Home Rule Charter, negate a Budget Act, or violate the Human Rights Act.”

For example, a recent attempt to legalize the sale of marijuana and redirect 40 percent of tax revenues to black residents was blocked by DCBOE for several of those reasons: it would direct revenues, discriminate based on race, and violate a provision in the budget (inserted by Congress) blocking the city from taking additional steps to legalize the sale of pot.

At the point when the board considers a measure’s legality (called a “subject matter determination”), it also assigns a number.

Once an initiative has been deemed legal, DCBOE prepares a short title and summary, and a challenge period begins. Any registered voter has 10 days to object to the title, summary statement, or the form of the legislation.

If the petition is accepted, the proposer then has 180 days to gather signatures—5 percent of the registered voters in a minimum of five of the eight wards (currently, D.C. has a total of 476,756 registered voters). One would need north of 20,000 signatures to get an initiative on the ballot.

Initiatives 72, 73, and 74 each sought to raise the minimum wage, but proposers failed to submit the required signatures. That was also the case for Initiative 75, which aimed to “integrate character development and citizenship education into public and public charter schools.”

Initiative 76, which sought to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for both tipped and non-tipped workers, kicked up a fair bit of dust in late 2015 and early 2016. The Board of Elections certified the measure, but then it got tied up in a lawsuit filed by Harry Wingo, then the head of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce. A judge originally sided with Wingo (who was arguing that the makeup of the board was illegal) before the decision was reversed.

It was widely assumed the measure would pass should it have appeared on the ballot. But petitioners withdrew the application after Mayor Muriel Bowser reached a deal with a diverse coalition to raise the minimum wage to $15 through the legislative process.

But the deal only incrementally raised the tipped minimum wage from $2.77 at the time to $5 by 2020. Several labor groups, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United-DC among them, called the deal a “sell-out” and vowed to get the tipped minimum wage issue on the ballot.

And so, here we are, voting on Initiative 77.