23rd Amendment

Section 1. The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as the Congress may direct:

A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article using appropriate legislation.

The Twenty-third Amendment gave district residents the right to vote for president. Under the amendment the number of the district's electors cannot exceed that of the state with the smallest population. In practice, this means that the district elects three presidential electors.



This amendment gave the people the right to vote for the electors to represent them in D.C. Each state get two electors, however only Washington D.C. gets three electors.

The Capital: The 23rd Amendment
Friday, Mar. 31, 1961

Thanks to a succession of oversights by the Founding Fathers and early Congresses, the residents of the District of Columbia have never enjoyed one particular constitutional right cherished by all other Americans: the privilege of voting. There was no reasoning attending the oversights; it was just plain neglect.† Last week Rhode Island cast the 36th affirmative vote for the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution, giving 746,000 Washingtonians the right to vote in presidential elections — and three electoral votes. Ohio and Kansas are expected to ratify the amendment this week, making the necessary two-thirds majority for official adoption (only one legislature—Arkansas—rejected the amendment outright, on the ground that 54% of the District's citizens are Negroes).

But after 161 years, Washingtonians will be limited to voting for the President and Vice President. They will continue to have no representative in Congress, no voice in their municipal government.

†One segment of the capital gained the right to vote in 1846, when one-third of the District's land area, now Arlington County, was ceded back to Virginia.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,872170,00.html

Congress passed the 23rd Amendment in 1961 gave all citizens the right to vote in the presidential elections and gets three electoral votes.