The founding fathers did not exactly intend things to work out this way, historians say. They carved the district out of Maryland and Virginia so the capital would not be part of any state, hoping to defuse state rivalries. But the arrangement created an unintended conundrum: if the district was not a state or part of a state, its residents could not vote in federal elections. Some of the framers fretted about this, but they effectively punted the problem.
Progress came slowly. Congress and the states approved the 23rd Amendment in 1961, granting district residents the right to vote for president and vice president. In 1973, President Richard M. Nixon signed a home-rule law empowering Washington to elect a mayor and council.
But giving the district Congressional representatives has been a more prickly matter. For years, segregationists opposed granting Washington, a mostly black city, votes in Congress. Then came four terms of mismanagement under Mayor Marion Barry in the 1980's and 1990's, prompting Congress to reject any suggestion of greater autonomy for the district.
Today, the city is running a surplus, its finances in their best shape in decades. But now partisan politics looms as the major obstacle to rights: Republicans fear that Washington, an overwhelmingly Democratic city, will tip the political balance in Congress if it receives seats in either of the closely divided houses.
Somewhat surprisingly, a Republican, Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, has proposed a compromise: give the district one House seat, balanced by an additional seat for Republican-dominated Utah. The bill would not grant the district Senate seats.
Davis's proposal has yet to gain broad support from Washington's fractious democracy activists, many of whom deride his plan as an unpalatable half-loaf. But to others, the district must take what it can get. Then, they say, they will look to 2008 and another chance to pre-empt Iowa and New Hampshire.
"After 200 years, what else can you do but agitate, agitate, agitate?" said Mark David Richards, a pollster who helped promote the primary.
| Continue James Dao's New York Times article "A Primary Without Representation, Respect or Fanfare"
The election will cost the city several hundred thousand dollars. The polls open at 7 a.m. and remain open until 8 p.m. But Republicans aren't even bothering to vote and will pick delegates for President Bush at their caucus meetings in February.
Tomorrow's non-binding vote ensures nothing except that each voter will be able to express a preference for a candidate. Write-ins are not permitted. And, in fact, the 38 Democratic delegates to the National Democratic Convention in Boston this summer, who will be chosen on Feb. 14 and March 6, are not bound by the results tomorrow.
Nonetheless, local Democratic Party officials say they are spending $100,000 on signs, telephone calls and radio spots urging voters to go to the polls tomorrow to show that the primary is meaningful.
Three out of every four registered voters in Washington are Democrats, but in some elections fewer than 8 percent of them turn out. As of Friday fewer than 1,000 absentee ballots had been requested.
| That's the end of Ann McFeatters' Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article "D.C. votes tomorrow in non-binding primary, but few care"
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