“The United States is embarrassingly the only democracy in the world that denies the citizens of its capital city from representation in the national legislative body.”
So writes my friend Elissa Froman in A Voice for Every Voter, a piece for the Religious Action Center blog.
Elissa describes the powerful coming-of-age moment that many U.S. citizens take for granted: the day she cast her first ballot, just weeks after her 18th birthday:
…I thought about my four grandparents, not one of whom was able to vote at the age of 18 – disenfranchised by Hitler’s laws and by the citizenship laws of Poland that forbade Jewish participation. I pushed the stylus through the ballot and with great pride, I voted with the knowledge that my vote, meant that I had a voice – that because I voted, I counted.
She goes on to describe her shock when she moved to the District for college, only to find that
Washington, DC has 600,000 residents, making its population approximately the same size as seven states, each with a voting representative and two senators…Yet their representation in Congress is limited to a single non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives.
Read Elissa’s entire post here, or visit DC Vote: Working to End Taxation Without Representation to learn more and urge your elected reps to pass the DC Voting Rights Act.
By Sapphireblue (via Flickr)
3 responses so far ↓
juliacsmith // March 1, 2009 at 4:52 pm |
p.s. If you like Elissa’s words, read more of them at She Who Has a Why (http://shewhohasawhy.blogspot.com/), where she shares updates and ruminations during her treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
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