Friend,

The Republican Party has long relied on racist voter suppression to maintain power. In 2020, amidst record voter turnout, Trump and his allies targeted majority-Black cities like Detroit to try to take away people’s votes. But democracy prevailed, ushering in our new presidential administration and Senate majority.

However, racist “stolen election” lies persisted, which led to January 6th’s takeover of our U.S. Capitol. And in just the past few months, state legislators in 47 states have introduced 361 bills to restrict voting rights.

Clearly, we have a crucial window to protect against attacks on our voting rights and strengthen our democracy. And one way to protect against racist voter suppression is to correct one of our nation’s greatest civil rights injustices: We can enfranchise the 710,000 people in plurality-Black Washington, D.C., giving residents long-overdue voting representation in Congress.

Sign now to tell Congress: The time for D.C. statehood is NOW! We must ensure Washington, D.C. residents finally get voting representation in Congress.

Denying voting representation for residents of our nation’s capital violates the democratic principles that the United States claims to represent.

Home to more people than Vermont and Wyoming, D.C. also pays more in federal taxes than most states, meaning its residents experience taxation without representation. Despite overwhelmingly supporting statehood, D.C. residents don’t even have control over their own local laws, which are subject to congressional approval or disapproval.

Fixing this voter disenfranchisement would not only correct a massive injustice, but also start to level the playing field for representation in the U.S. Senate.

Because each state gets two senators no matter its population size, the Senate heavily over-represents less populated states—which are often majority-white. Today, although the number of Democratic senators is equal to the number of Republican senators, Democratic senators represent 29% more people. That’s a fundamentally undemocratic system.

And because D.C. is not a state, its residents have no voting representation in either the Senate or the House of Representatives.

They’re currently represented by nonvoting House delegate Rep. Eleanor Holmes-Norton, who recently explained: “Congress has two choices. It can continue to exercise undemocratic, autocratic authority over the American citizens who reside in our nation’s capital, treating them, in the words of Frederick Douglass, as ‘aliens, not citizens, but subjects.’ Or it can live up to this nation’s promise and ideals, end taxation without representation and pass H.R. 51.”

Please sign if you agree: We have to protect our democracy and expand the right to vote to ALL American citizens. We must urgently enfranchise D.C. residents and make D.C. a state.

In solidarity,

Rashida