Voting Rights
The denial of statehood to D.C. is an egregious form of voter suppression happening in our country today.
Without statehood, D.C. residents – the majority of whom are Black and brown – do not have any voting representation in Congress, even though Congress has undue power over the region.
- Like in any state, D.C. residents vote for their local government – the Mayor, D.C. Council, Attorney General, and Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners.
- But unlike a state, Congress has the power to overturn local laws passed by locally elected officials, dictate how D.C. can use its own local tax dollars, and create its own laws for D.C. without any input from residents or local elected officials.
- Imagine if local laws passed by any other state legislature could be overturned by a Congress that does not include their state’s voting representative.
This unfair federal intrusion takes away the power of locally elected officials and hands it over to politicians never elected by the people they govern.
When you put it in perspective, D.C.’s lack of statehood makes no democratic sense at all. We can’t let Congress trample voting rights in our nation’s capital.
Even Founding Fathers James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay always envisioned full voting rights for D.C. residents, writing in the Federalist Papers that D.C. residents “will have had their voice in the election of the government which is to exercise authority over them.”