Amendment XXIII — Section 2

By the mid-twentieth century, a structural anomaly had persisted in American governance for over 170 years: residents of the District of Columbia — the seat of the federal government — had no voice in presidential elections. The District was not a state, and Article II of the Constitution confined the appointment of presidential electors to states. Though the District's population numbered in the hundreds of thousands by 1960, its residents paid federal taxes, served in the military, and were subject to federal law, yet had no electoral participation in choosing the nation's chief executive. The Twenty-Third Amendment was drafted specifically to remedy this democratic gap as applied to presidential elections, and Section 2 was included to give Congress the tools to make that remedy operative in practice.