This month, Kimberly Perry, the new head of D.C. Vote, acknowledged the fatigue of past efforts to gain federal voting rights for the residents of Washington, D.C., and told The Washington Post, “there’s always been the discussion of retrocession [to Maryland] as a possible solution.” The possibility of “retrocession” has not gotten much attention, but a carefully crafted bill that permits a “legalistic” and “technical” return of the District to the state from which it was carved, for federal voting purposes alone, is made possible by a recent and largely overlooked Supreme Court case. Legislation can now be passed and approved in Maryland, D.C. and Congress to establish voting rights equality for D.C. residents, technically through the state of Maryland, but as an independent congressional district for only D.C. residents. Here’s how: After the 2010 Census, West Virginia’s legislature decided against a redistricting plan that would have created three districts that were almost precisely equal in population (they varied by only one person) and instead selected a new map that included larger population variations but did a better job of keeping communities unified. A federal court in Charleston, W.Va., had rejected the plan because of the population variance, but on September 26, 2012, in Tennant v. Jefferson County Commission, the Supreme Court approved it, contravening a perceived absolutist approach to the one-person, one-vote doctrine from the 1963 case of Wesberry v. Sanders. The Supreme Court instead based its Tennant decision on its 1983 precedent of Karcher v. Daggett, saying the lower court “failed to afford appropriate deference to West Virginia’s reasonable exercise of its political judgment.”
