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DC Elections Board Printed Its Voter Guides With the District Flag Upside Down

Another great moment in bureaucracy.
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Great job, guys! Photograph by Benjamin Freed.

By design standards, the District’s flag is a fairly simple one—three red stars above two horizontal red bars on a white background. Should be simple enough to cut out and paste on the cover of a government pamphlet that gets sent out to 456,633 registered voters ahead of a general election, right?

Wrong.

The guides being sent to DC voters this week in preparation for the November 4 general election feature the District flag on their cover, with one obvious, bone-headed mistake: the flag is upside down, a glaring error that elicited Twitter groans from some eagle-eyed local government observers.

Denise Tolliver, a spokeswoman for the DC Board of Elections, claims the upside down flag is part of a game her agency wants voters to play on its website to identify what’s wrong with the voter guide. OK, then.

Find Benjamin Freed on Twitter at @brfreed.

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Staff Writer

Benjamin Freed joined Washingtonian in August 2013 and covers politics, business, and media. He was previously the editor of DCist and has also written for Washington City Paper, the New York Times, the New Republic, Slate, and BuzzFeed. He lives in Adams Morgan.