The next time a liberal friend of yours tells you the American people believe corporate money in politics is a winning issue for Democrats, you can simply point out that in deep-blue liberal bastion of the District of Columbia that organizers of a petition drive to ban corporate donations fell short of the threshold for getting the issue on November's ballot.

That's right, as Mike DeBonis of the Washington Post reported today, the D.C. Board of Elections "invalidated about 9,000 of those [signatures], leaving them short of the 23,298 valid signatures required to appear on the ballot." DeBonis noted that "[t]he signatures were tossed out for a variety of reasons — belonging to unregistered voters, duplicating other valid signatures, missing addresses, having addresses that don’t match voter records, and illegibility. All told, the effort came up 1,726 signatures short."