When Ward 4 resident Andrew Hunt received a campaign email from Rhonda Henderson last week, he wondered: How did the candidate for the Ward 4 seat on the D.C. State Board of Education get his email address?

“It was when I clicked on the ‘Why did I get this?’ link that Mailchimp adds to the bottom of its emails that it said I received it because I had contacted Council member Todd,” said Hunt, referring to Brandon Todd, the Council member for Ward 4. Todd is also a supporter of Henderson’s in today’s special election to fill the vacant Ward 4 seat on the State Board of Education.

That he got the email from Henderson bothers Hunt, who runs his own business working with non-profits to build and manage database systems. He supports Frazier O’Leary, another of the candidates for the seat. And he feels like Todd crossed a line in sending a campaign email to a constituent who had not signed up for it.

And Hunt may be right.

Wesley Williams, a spokesman for the Office of Campaign Finance, says D.C. law prohibits elected officials and city employees from using government resources — including “supplies, materials, equipment, office space, facilities, and telephones and other utilities” — to support or oppose any candidate for office. The Council’s Code of Conduct includes a similar prohibition.

That means that if Todd used a list created from emails from constituents to his Council office to send out a campaign email for Henderson, he may have run afoul of D.C. law and the Council’s Code of Conduct.

Todd’s spokesman Joshua Fleitman said the Council member sent the email “from his personal account,” and that Henderson had paid to activate it and would be recording that expense in an upcoming campaign finance report. But Fleitman did not respond to a follow-up question on where Todd got the emails he used to send the campaign email for Henderson.

In her own email, Henderson made no mention of paying in any way for the email list her campaign email was sent to. “I do not have access to the email addresses,” she wrote. “I did not purchase the list nor was it lent to me.”

Hunt says he only ever contacted Todd’s office to advocate for a paid family leave bill and to ask for traffic fixes in his neighborhood. Another Ward 4 resident, Jenn Kauffman, said much the same in a series of tweets last week.

“I triple checked and received no campaign email from him before 11/9, and no emails from me to his campaign,” she said. “I know campaigns buy/rent emails all the time (bad form, IMO), but the subscribe message specifically says I’m on it because I merely contacted him. As a constituent.”

Hunt says that while he knows Todd has endorsed Henderson in the Ward 4 race, using his list to send a campaign email is a step too far.

“First, spamming constituents with campaign emails is just wrong. Contacting an elected official is not giving them license to send you whatever they want. Second, it gives incumbents an unfair advantage. They can build their campaigns — and as we see here, the campaigns of whoever they choose to support — by contacting constituents who have simply asked for services or shared their opinion on an issue. In an election that few know is happening, let alone who’s running, this is a powerful tool.”

A veteran of various D.C. campaigns who asked not to be named says the sharing of email lists has happened in the past among other candidates and elected officials. But the staff member for another Council member who asked not to be named says they maintain distinct email lists and do not share contacts between them. They say the Council office has one list to contact constituents, and the Council member’s campaign — run separately — has its own.

The Council’s general counsel said it would not comment on whether the use of an email list generated from constituent work would violate the Code of Conduct, saying only that “as the legal representative for the Council members, the general counsel cannot ethically answer questions regarding their clients.”

In the past, Todd has faced questions and penalties for campaign finance violations. In 2017, he was fined $5,100 for failing to properly document and account for tens of thousands of dollars worth of campaign contributions.

Tuesday’s special election for the Ward 4 seats wraps up what was a hotly contested campaign season for four other seats on the State Board of Education, an elected body with little formal power over the city’s schools. The races for the seats settled during the Nov. 6 general election featured significant increases in fundraising and allegations of dirty online tricks.

This story originally appeared on WAMU.