Nominating, but not voting for president

And Faleomavaega pointed out that it is no simple matter to grant American Samoa equal status with the 50 states.

“We still have our chieftain system in place,” he said. “Some of these things don’t necessarily conform to constitutional standards of equal protection or due process. We have it, but to a certain extent because of our chieftain system, our cultural system, and our way of protecting our communal lands, we are quite different from the other states.”

Clinton won the Feb. 6 American Samoa caucuses in which only 285 people took part. American Samoa is entitled to nine delegate votes at the Democratic convention.

Federal courts have rejected arguments that Americans living in the U.S. territories should be allowed to vote in presidential elections.

The Constitution, the courts have held, is clear: Article II explicitly says that the president shall be elected by electors who are chosen by the states.

That’s why it took a constitutional amendment to allow D.C. residents to finally vote in 1964.

In 2000, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit heard for the second time an argument it had rejected in 1994, the Puerto Rico residents should have the right to cast ballots in presidential elections.

The plaintiffs said a treaty called International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by the Senate in 1992, required that they be given a vote in presidential elections.

But the judges said that “this court held with undeniable clarity” in 1994 that “the residents of Puerto Rico have no constitutional right to participate in the national election of the President and Vice-President.”

So, for people in American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands to be able to vote in a presidential election would require either:

• The admission of these territories to the Union as states, as was done with the former territories of Alaska in 1959, Oklahoma in 1907, etc., or —
• Adding an amendment to the Constitution, similar to the one ratified in 1960 which granted Americans residing in the District of Columbia the right to vote in presidential elections.

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