23. Amendment to the United States Constitution
The 23rd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America , the Twenty-third Amendment , gives the District of Columbia the right to have electors for the election of President and Vice President . The addition was proposed by Congress on June 17, 1960 and was ratified by the required number of US states on March 29, 1961.
text
Part 1
English
The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such a manner as the Congress may direct:
A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.
German
The district which will receive the seat of the United States Government shall designate in a manner determined by Congress:
The number of electors for President and Vice-President equal to the number of Senators and Representatives in Congress that the district should have sent if it were a state, but in no case more than the least populous state; these should complement the electors nominated by the states; for the election of the president and the vice-president they should be viewed as electors nominated by a state. They should meet in the district and perform the tasks that are prescribed by the twelfth amendment to the constitution .
Section 2
English
The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
German
Congress has the right to enforce this article through appropriate legislation.
District of Columbia voting rights
The District of Columbia was originally intended to be the seat of government, not a place of residence. Even so, in 1960 the district had more residents than thirteen of the 50 states. However, he did not have the right to appoint electors to elect the president; this amendment resolved this problem. The District of Columbia may now nominate as many electors as a state with the same number of inhabitants is allowed to nominate (the number of electors of a state corresponds to the number of senators and representatives sent by it) in the manner determined by Congress. In no case may the District of Columbia have more electors than the most populous state. Since Wyoming , the least populous state in the United States according to the 2010 census with 563,000 inhabitants, only has three electors, the District of Columbia is also currently limited to the nomination of a maximum of three electors. Lately, however, this rule has no longer played a role, as the district now only exceeds Wyoming and Vermont in terms of population and therefore only has three electors due to its population. The first presidential election in which the District of Columbia sent electors was in 1964 .
The Constitutional Amendment does not make the District of Columbia a state or give it any representation in Congress. In the case of the district, the right to decide on the mode of voting when determining the electorate, which is otherwise due to the individual states, does not lie with the district's own government, but with the US Congress.
In 1978, Congress made another amendment to the Constitution that would have treated the district in nationwide elections as a state with the same number of inhabitants, so that it would have both MPs in the House of Representatives and two senators. He would also have abolished the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution. However, it was not ratified by the seven-year deadline set in the proposal. It therefore expired in 1985 after it had not been ratified by the required three-quarters majority of the parliaments of the individual states . The district with its high percentage of African American population is an absolute stronghold of the Democratic Party. So there was enough resistance from the Republicans, who had regained their strength in 1980, to prevent ratification.
The lack of parliamentary representation, which continues to this day, is highly unpopular in the district even across party lines; For some time now, all vehicle license plates in the district have been labeled "Taxation without Representation," derived from the "No Taxation without Representation" motto of the American Revolutionary War .
