The D.C. Office of Campaign Finance has thrown out the last complaint filed against former councilmember Elissa Silverman over polling she conducted ahead of last year’s Democratic primary, closing out a political and legal saga that Silverman says ultimately cost her re-election.

The saga revolved around polling Silverman conducted in Ward 3 last June, which focused on the ward’s competitive Democratic primary. Silverman said she used the results of the poll to better understand the dynamics of the close primary race and to measure public opinion for her own re-election bid for her At-Large seat. But critics accused her of using the poll to push a number of progressive candidates to drop out of the race and coalesce behind the ultimate victor,  Councilmember Matthew Frumin (D-Ward 3).

An official complaint from another candidate for D.C. Council resulted in an October surprise for Silverman, when the D.C. Office of Campaign Finance ruled that she had misused public campaign funds to conduct the polling. The ruling was eventually overturned, but not until December — more than a month after she had lost her bid for another term on the council. Two other complaints were filed in relation to Silverman’s polling, the last of which was dismissed last week. (One was filed by Chuck Thies, a political consultant and current spokesman for Ward 7 Councilmember Vincent Gray, and the other by Eric Goulet, the current Ward 3 member of the State Board of Education and former council candidate who lost to Frumin.)

“While it’s too late to change the outcome of the election, I’m glad OCF finally reached the only possible conclusion, that these politically-motivated complaints were completely baseless,” said Silverman in a statement, which repeated her belief that the OCF ruling against her only a week before the November election was the reason she lost to Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie (I-At Large). “It is clear that the now-overturned decision was a decisive factor in the outcome of the election. No other candidate should be placed in the same impossible position.”

Silverman also says that what happened to her should prompt reforms to how the Office of Campaign Finance conducts investigations, especially as it pertains to any rulings before the election. She says that D.C. should adopt the federal standard and not issue rulings that can be appealed so close to Election Day, that OCF should be more clear about the timelines of its investigations, and that actual evidence of a violation should be required before a full investigation is launched.

“It took far too long for these allegations to be dismissed, and for the record to be clear that my actions during the election were lawful,” said Silverman in her statement. “OCF’s actions affected the outcome of an election, a major transgression it has shown no remorse about.”