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The District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment was a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that would have given the District of Columbia full representation in the United States Congress, full representation in the Electoral College system, and full participation in the process by which the Constitution is amended.
In 1978, Congress proposed the District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment. Under this amendment, the District of Columbia would have been "treated as though it were a State" regarding congressional representation, presidential elections (replacing the limited treatment under the Twenty-third Amendment), and the constitutional amendment process.
The Twenty-third Amendment (Amendment XXIII) to the United States Constitution extends the right to participate in presidential elections to the District of Columbia.The amendment grants to the district electors in the Electoral College, as though it were a state, though the district can never have more electors than the least-populous state.
Since the enactment of the 23rd amendment to the Constitution in 1961, [1] the District of Columbia has participated in 16 presidential elections.The amendment states that it cannot have any more electoral votes than the state with the smallest number of electors. [2]
A further effort to grant the District of Columbia full voting rights in Congress via a constitutional amendment came in 1978. The District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment passed both chambers of Congress, but it failed to receive the necessary number of state ratifications by its 1985 deadline.
Since 1999, only about 20 proposed amendments have received a vote by either the full House or Senate. The last time a proposal gained the necessary two-thirds support in both the House and the Senate for submission to the states was the District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment in 1978. Only 16 states had ratified it when the seven-year ...
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In 2009, the Senate passed the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act, which would allow the district to elect a voting member to the House. However, an amendment added by John Ensign would repeal most of the district's gun laws and prohibit it from restricting gun rights any further.