Should elected officials in D.C. only be allowed to serve two terms in office? Maybe, maybe not.

But that question won’t be posed to District residents any time soon, even though they voted on it once before.

The D.C. Board of Elections ruled Wednesday that a proposed ballot initiative that would ask residents in 2020 whether the mayor, attorney general and members of the D.C. Council should be limited to two terms in office can’t legally be voted on.

In a 10-page decision, the board said that imposing term limits would require amending the city’s charter, a process that cannot be initiated by voters. Only the D.C. Council can propose amendments to the charter, which then have to be approved by voters.

The board’s decision provoked some head-scratching — even on the board — largely because in 1994, D.C. residents voted on and approved a similar ballot measure imposing term limits. (The D.C. Council repealed it in 2001 before anyone could be term-limited out of office.) At the time, the city’s attorney general said that any such vote would violate the charter, but he was ignored.

So how can a vote that happened 25 years ago be declared illegal today?

“I couldn’t tell you,” said Kenneth McGhie, the general counsel for the elections board. “The same objections were made in 1994, but for some reason the board ignored them and put it on the ballot. We have no documentation for why that was done.”

James Butler, a former mayoral candidate who is spearheading the ballot initiative, said he plans on appealing the board’s decision in D.C. Superior Court. He said he disagrees with the board’s finding that imposing term limits would require amending the charter.

“It happened in 1994, it went through in 1994,” he said. “How did it happen? Because it was compliant back then, and we believe it’s compliant now.”

Butler says term limits are necessary in D.C. to allow new voices into the political process. The D.C. Council’s longest-serving members — Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) and Council chairman Phil Mendelson — have spent almost 50 years combined on the city’s legislature. Evans is currently embroiled in an ethics scandal involving allegations of influence peddling.

But critics of term limits — Evans included — say that the ultimate term limit is the regularly scheduled election, and that forcing anyone out of office after a set number of terms means institutional knowledge and experience are likely to be lost.

Currently, 15 states impose term limits on legislators, while more than three dozen states limit terms for governors. The types of term limits can vary, though. Some states impose limits on consecutive terms. Virginia, for example, bans them, while Maryland has a two-term limit. But those do not apply to legislators in either of the states, although last year Gov. Larry Hogan did propose extending the two-term limit to include members of the General Assembly.

Locally, in 1992, voters in Prince George’s County imposed term limits on members of the County Council, and in 2000, they shot down an effort to rescind them. In 2016, voters in Montgomery County agreed after multiple attempts to limit members of the County Council and the county executive to two consecutive terms in office, leading to significant turnover in the 2018 election.

This story first appeared on WAMU.