The nine people named “Anthony Williams” who live in Washington, D.C. (according to Switchboard.com) each have until tomorrow afternoon to announce themselves the winner in Washington, D.C.’s Democratic mayoral primary. As Chatterbox explained yesterday, the nation’s capital city got into this fix when Mayor Anthony Williams failed to supply the D.C. election board with the 2,000 valid signatures necessary to get him onto the ballot. (Click here to learn how this happened.) As a result, Williams had to run as a write-in candidate, and under D.C. election law anybody else in Washington named Anthony Williams may challenge Mayor Williams’ anticipated victory (they haven’t finished counting the ballots) by claiming himself to be a candidate. The pretender would probably have to be a registered Democrat, but that’s not much of an obstacle, since pretty much everyone who lives in D.C. is a registered Democrat. Chatterbox vowed yesterday to contact as many of these Anthonys as possible and to ask each one, very nicely, if he would promise not to try to make himself mayor. Today, Chatterbox reached three of the nine:
Anthony No. 6
Middle Initial: L.
Age: 31.
Occupation: Software consultant.
Party affiliation: Democrat.
Do you renounce the office? “I won’t claim the victory for myself.”
Anthony No. 7
Middle Initial: M.
Age: 30.
Occupation: Basketball player. (Later, he explained that he was kidding.)
Political party: Declined to say.
Do you renounce the office? “I’m the one who’s gonna step forward and say it’s me, and you’re gonna blow it.” (Chatterbox is pretty sure he was kidding.)
Anthony No. 8
Middle Initial: R.
Occupation: Project analyst for the Federal Aviation Administration.
Political party: Democrat.
Do you renounce the office? “Oh, yeah.”
(Anthonys 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 9 remained unreachable today.)
