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DNC Commemorates Emancipation Day and Calls for DC Voting Rights

April 16, 2007

Today, as the District of Columbia celebrates the abolition of slavery in the Nation’s Capital, residents will also rally together to call on Congress and President Bush to give DC full voting rights in the House of Representatives. The District of Columbia remains the only place in the country whose tax-paying residents do not have voting representation in the United States Congress. Instead of working to remedy this inequality, the Bush Administration has threatened to veto a bill to give DC voting rights in the House.

Today’s march, the largest ever of its kind, follows news reports last week that Bush appointees at the Election Assistance Commission have been playing politics with voting rights issues. The New York Times revealed that the EAC altered a report that concluded that there was little evidence of voter fraud in the country. In past elections, Republicans have used the presence of voter fraud to often justify disenfranchising minority, seniors, rural Americans, young people and the disabled.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and DNC Voting Rights Institute Chair Donna Brazile issued the following statement coinciding with Emancipation Day and today’s DC voting rights march:

“As we celebrate the end of slavery in the District of Columbia we also call for full voting rights to be extended to the people of the District of Columbia who continue to be treated as second class citizens. Today’s march speaks not just to the voting rights of the people of the District of Columbia but to the larger struggle for voting rights for all Americans.

“It is an egregious oversight that the District of Columbia’s residents who pay taxes and are fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan are not afforded a vote on policies that affect their everyday lives. President Bush should stop his veto threat and instead support democracy for all U.S. citizens. We call on Congress and the White House to remedy this voting rights injustice and to protect the right to vote for all Americans who remain unfairly disenfranchised.”