Amendment Twenty Three and It's Meaning

Amendment Twenty Three

"Section 1

The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as 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.

Section 2

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."



The 23rd amendment is mostly all about representation in Washington DC. As the District of Columbia is not technically a state of the U.S., the citizens of DC used to not have the right to vote or anyone to represent them. The amendment was passed in 1961 allowing citizens the right to vote for their electoral college voters and to be represented. DC has no Senators or House representatives, but they do get electoral voters. The rule with this is that they get as many as the lowest populated state, at the moment this is three electoral votes.
I personally think this amendment was a great idea because it is not fair that anyone who is a citizen of America not have the right to vote, and I also think it is fair that they have just electoral voters and no Senator or House representative.

This video helped me understand the amendment better. It follows a woman wondering if she has the right to vote for president and the man shows her the 23rd amendment that states she can do so now because of the amendment. It's short and to the point so I really enjoyed that about it since I was able to gather some more information on the amendment.

This video is a little rough with some spelling errors, but I chose it because it taught me something that I didn't understand completely before. "Taxation without representation" which is where the citizens of DC had to pay taxes but were not allowed the right to vote. It also shows a picture of the states that ratified the amendment and shows that the South was widely against it since DC is prominently African American. It does surprise me that people really believed they shouldn't have the right to vote.