More evidence emerged Wednesday that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Krishanti Vignarajah may not have met the state constitutional requirement that a candidate for governor live in Maryland for the five years before an election.
The Washington Post reported that Vignarajah in 2014 checked a box affirming that she lived at a co-op unit in Dupont Circle when asked if she lived in the District in a letter sent by the Washington, D.C., Board of Elections. The board sent the letter because it had information suggesting Viganarajah was registered to vote in Maryland.
She also used the same Dupont Circle address in May 2016 when she applied for a Maryland marriage license, according to the Post.
The news comes after Bethesda Beat first reported in August that Vignarajah was registered to vote in both Maryland and D.C. and had voted in D.C. in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014. At the time she was working in the White House as a policy director for first lady Michelle Obama as well as in the State Department.
When Bethesda Beat first asked her campaign about the voting record, a spokesman, Steve Rabin, equated it to “Trump-style politics” and described it as “the same sort of outlandish attacks that the president tried to make about President Obama’s birthplace.”
Vignarajah now lives in Gaithersburg.
Her campaign has repeatedly maintained that she is a lifelong Maryland resident. She described the D.C. apartment as a “crash pad” in a WAMU interview shortly after Bethesda Beat published its report.
In January, she dropped a legal effort requesting an Anne Arundel County judge to formally rule that she is eligible to run for governor. The state Attorney General’s Office had attempted to have the case dismissed, arguing no one had legally challenged her eligibility to run for governor, before she dropped it voluntarily.
A spokeswoman for Vignarajah told the Post that her political opponents are trying to revive this issue “now that she has such momentum” after performing well at candidate forums and in straw polls.