Perhaps it was a slightly more kinder-and-gentler election in 2021.
In her annual election wrapup at the first Arlington County Board meeting after the votes were in, perennial protest candidate Audrey Clement told board members that she’d been able to gather up a good portion of her campaign signage from medians.
“I recovered about 450 signs, or two-thirds of the total,” she told board members. “This is a significant improvement over 2020, when two-thirds of my signs were trashed.”
Clement ran second in the four-candidate County Board race, although she received only about one-third the votes of incumbent Democrat Takis Karantonis, who cruised to re-election.
Under the county code, candidates for office have seven days after the election to retrieve their signage from public rights-of-way. Clement generally is scrupulous about meeting those rules, but like both Democrats and Republicans, she never gets back the exact number of signs she placed out – even though it is a crime to remove campaign signage that is legally residing in public areas.
Clement has been running for various offices for a decade, first under the Green Party banner and more recently as an independent, and seems to have no intention of slowing down. She already has signaled she wants to run again in 2022, and in a post-election message to supporters said her only regret was that elections were only held once per year.