Five People in Fifty‑Four Years
Only five people have ever held the territory's seat in Congress. On November 3, voters pick a sixth — for an office that still has no vote.
Two different questions get mixed together. They have two different answers.
Why no vote on the House floor?
The Constitution says the House is made up of members chosen by the people of the states. The Virgin Islands is not a state.
So no law and no House rule can give our delegate a floor vote. It would take a constitutional amendment, or statehood, or some other change in the territory's status.
This is not a decision Congress makes each year. It is a wall.
Then what is the vote that keeps disappearing?
Before the House takes a final vote on a bill, it does its debating and amending in a setting called the Committee of the Whole. Same 435 people, same room, different rulebook.
Since 1993, the House has sometimes let delegates vote in that setting. Sometimes.
There is a catch written into the rule: if a delegate's vote would actually decide the outcome, the House throws the result out and votes again without them.
Republicans sued over it in 1993. The court's answer is the thing to remember. Yes, the judge said, the Committee of the Whole is basically the House, and letting delegates vote there for real would violate the Constitution. But this particular rule is fine — because the do‑over provision means a delegate's vote can never change anything.
So why does it keep getting taken away?
Because it is cheap to take. It is not in the Constitution — it is in the House rulebook, which the majority rewrites by simple majority on the first day of every Congress.
Democrats have put it back four times. Republicans have taken it out three times. All six non‑voting members caucus with Democrats. That is the entire explanation.
The vote that matters is blocked by the Constitution.
The vote that doesn't matter is blocked by whoever won the last election.
Since January 3, 1973, the U.S. Virgin Islands has been entitled to one seat in the United States House of Representatives. In the 27 two‑year terms since, the territory could have sent 27 different people to Washington. It has sent five.
a seat
terms
elected
Three of them account for 25 of those 27 terms.
That is not an accident, and it is not apathy. It is the rational response to an office whose only real currency is time. A delegate cannot vote on final passage of a bill. What a delegate has instead is committee assignments, relationships, and seniority — all of which take years to build and all of which reset to zero the moment the seat changes hands.
On November 3, it changes hands. Stacey Plaskett is running for governor rather than a sixth term, leaving the seat open for the first time since 2014 and only the fourth time in five decades. Ten candidates filed. Whoever wins arrives in Washington in January 2027 with no seniority, in a chamber where they will not be permitted to cast a vote that counts.
Before there was a seat
The United States bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917. Residents became U.S. citizens in 1927. For the next 46 years, they had no elected representation in the federal government of any kind.
The territory was administered first by the Navy, then by appointed governors. The Organic Act of 1936 and the Revised Organic Act of 1954 built out local self‑government in stages, but Washington remained a place the Virgin Islands could petition, not a place it could send anyone.
That changed in a two‑step sequence, and the same man drove both steps.
1968 — the Elected Governors Act. Congress finally allowed the Virgin Islands and Guam to elect their own governors rather than receive appointed ones. The first elected governor of the Virgin Islands, Melvin H. Evans, took office in 1971. Hold onto that name.
1968 — the Washington Representative. In the same year, the territory created a new elected post whose entire job was to lobby the federal government from inside Washington. Voters gave it to Ron de Lugo, a St. Croix radio personality and former territorial senator who had been the territory's Democratic National Committeeman since 1960.
De Lugo was not a member of Congress. He had no seat, no committee, no floor privileges. He was, functionally, the territory's registered advocate in the capital, and he served two terms at it. He used them to build relationships with House power brokers — most consequentially Philip Burton of California, who chaired the subcommittee with jurisdiction over the territories — and to lobby for the thing he actually wanted, which was a seat.
He testified repeatedly for a bill creating delegate positions for Guam and the Virgin Islands. Guam's Washington representative, Antonio Borja Won Pat, was doing the same work in parallel. The two of them are the reason the office exists.
The seat is created
Public Law 92‑271, enacted April 10, 1972, established the office of Delegate to the House of Representatives for both Guam and the Virgin Islands. Two‑year terms. The delegate could introduce legislation and speak on the House floor. The delegate could not vote on the floor.
De Lugo won the November 1972 election and was sworn in on January 3, 1973, as a member of the 93rd Congress. Won Pat was sworn in the same day.
Within five weeks, on February 5, 1973, the two of them co‑authored a proposed constitutional amendment to give residents of Guam and the Virgin Islands the right to vote for president. Fifty‑three years later, they still cannot.
The wider family of non‑voting members: Puerto Rico's Resident Commissioner predates all of this, established in 1900 and serving four‑year terms. The District of Columbia regained a delegate in 1971. Guam and the Virgin Islands arrived in 1972, American Samoa in 1980, and the Northern Mariana Islands in 2009. Together these six members represent roughly four million U.S. citizens and nationals with no vote on the House floor.
The five
The first and by far the longest‑serving. De Lugo built the office from nothing and used it on structural questions: political status, self‑governance, federal‑territorial relations. He legislated the transfer of Water Island to the territory and worked to protect Salt River on St. Croix. He rose to chair the House Interior Committee's Subcommittee on Insular and International Affairs — the single most important perch a territorial delegate can hold — and used it on behalf of the Pacific territories as much as his own. Guam's delegate Robert Underwood called him his greatest ally in Congress on status issues.
He left the seat once, in 1978, to run for governor. He lost. He came back in 1980 and held it for seven more terms. The federal building in Charlotte Amalie carries his name. He died in 2020 at 89.
The only Republican ever to hold the seat, and the only person to serve as both Governor and Delegate. Evans was the last appointed governor of the Virgin Islands and then the first elected one, serving 1969–1975. He won de Lugo's open seat in 1978.
He lost it in 1980 to de Lugo, who campaigned partly on the argument that a Republican delegate was structurally useless in a Democratic House — that when the crunch came, the majority leadership could not count on him. Evans went on to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago under President Reagan. He died in 1984.
That 1980 argument is worth remembering. It is the earliest local statement of the central problem of the office: a delegate's power depends less on the delegate than on who controls the chamber.
The only independent. Frazer, a Charlotte Amalie native with a Howard law degree, challenged de Lugo in 1992 and lost. When de Lugo retired in 1994, Frazer placed second in the initial round behind Democratic nominee Eileen R. Petersen and then beat her in the runoff.
He served a single term, in the 104th Congress — the same Congress in which the new Republican majority stripped delegates of the Committee of the Whole vote they had held for exactly one term. Frazer arrived just in time for the office to lose the only floor power it had ever been granted.
Eighteen uninterrupted years, second only to de Lugo. A physician by training, she was the first woman to represent the Virgin Islands in Congress and the first female physician to serve in Congress. She worked extensively on health disparities and chaired the Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust. She sponsored the legislation naming the Charlotte Amalie federal building for de Lugo.
She left the seat in 2014 to run for governor. She lost.
Plaskett began her career working for de Lugo, then served as counsel to the House Ethics Committee and as senior counsel to the Deputy Attorney General at the Justice Department. She challenged Christian‑Christensen in the 2012 primary and lost, then won the open seat in 2014 with 90.7 percent of the vote.
In 2021 she became the first non‑voting delegate in history to serve as an impeachment manager, prosecuting the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump before the Senate — putting a delegate who cannot vote on the House floor at the podium of the Senate chamber. In January 2025 she argued that the non‑voting status of the six territorial members is a colonial arrangement.
She is now running for governor. Like de Lugo in 1978 and Christian‑Christensen in 2014, she is trading the seat for a shot at Government House. Both predecessors who tried it lost.
What the job actually is
The powers of the office are frequently misdescribed locally, in both directions. Here is the accurate version.
A delegate can
- Introduce bills and resolutions
- Speak and debate on the House floor
- Serve on standing committees and vote in them
- Chair subcommittees — and full committees, in the majority
- Serve on select, conference and joint committees
- Sponsor and cosponsor legislation
- Do full constituent casework and secure federal funding
A delegate cannot
- Vote on final passage of legislation
- Vote in the House
- Preside over the House
The committee vote is not a small thing. Most legislation is written, amended and killed in committee, and a delegate's vote there counts exactly as much as any member's. De Lugo's subcommittee chairmanship shaped territorial policy across the Caribbean and Pacific for years. The floor vote a delegate lacks is, in practice, the final ratifying step on bills whose content was settled earlier.
But the floor vote is also the one that gets counted, reported and remembered — and on the biggest questions, where leadership writes the bill and the floor vote is the whole contest, the Virgin Islands has no say at all.
The rule that keeps getting turned on and off
The case that settled all this is Michel v. Anderson, 14 F.3d 623 (D.C. Cir. 1994). Minority Leader Robert Michel and twelve colleagues sued over the 1993 rule, arguing it handed legislative power to people not chosen by the voters of any state.
The district court agreed with the premise and upheld the rule anyway. For most practical purposes, the judge wrote, the Committee of the Whole is the House of Representatives — and an unqualified delegate vote there would violate Article I. The rule survived only because the automatic revote left it with no effect, or at most a remote and speculative one, on the actual exercise of legislative power. The D.C. Circuit affirmed.
It is not a theoretical safeguard. On a roll call in June 1994, a delegate vote proved decisive, the mechanism fired, and the result changed when the House voted again without them.
| Congress | Years | Delegate vote | House majority |
|---|---|---|---|
| 103rd | 1993–1994 | Yes — adopted | Democratic |
| 104th | 1995–1996 | No — stricken | Republican |
| 105th–109th | 1997–2006 | No | Republican |
| 110th | 2007–2008 | Yes — restored | Democratic |
| 111th | 2009–2010 | Yes | Democratic |
| 112th | 2011–2012 | No — removed | Republican |
| 113th–115th | 2013–2018 | No | Republican |
| 116th | 2019–2020 | Yes — restored | Democratic |
| 117th | 2021–2022 | Yes | Democratic |
| 118th | 2023–2024 | No — removed | Republican |
| 119th | 2025–2026 | No | Republican |
The pattern does not require interpretation. In every Congress since 1993, delegates have had this vote when Democrats organized the House and lacked it when Republicans did. Bills to restore it died in committee in four consecutive Republican‑led Congresses between 2011 and 2017.
This is worth stating plainly and without partisan editorializing, because the underlying fact is structural rather than moral: the delegates have all caucused with the Democrats. Every delegate the Virgin Islands has sent to Washington except Melvin Evans has been a Democrat or an independent aligned with them, and the same has been broadly true of the other territorial seats. A majority that adds delegate votes adds votes to its own side; a majority that removes them removes votes from the other. Both parties have behaved exactly as institutional self‑interest predicts.
The consequence for Virgin Islanders is the part that matters. The scope of their representative's power in Washington is set by an electorate that does not include them, in an election they cannot vote in, for reasons that have nothing to do with anything they did at the polls.
The argument underneath
Behind the rules fight sits the older question of why the territory is in this category at all. Both sides of it deserve stating.
The case against territorial votes
Territories are not states because they have not become states, and the path to a vote runs through resolving status rather than through a rules workaround.
Adding non‑state voters also dilutes the votes of members whose constituents never agreed to the arrangement.
And there is a fiscal asymmetry specific to the territories — Virgin Islanders do not carry federal income tax obligations to the U.S. Treasury the way District of Columbia residents do, which is why the taxation‑without‑representation argument lands differently here than it does for D.C.
The case for them
Virgin Islanders are U.S. citizens governed by federal law they cannot vote on. They pay Social Security and Medicare taxes and serve in the armed forces at rates exceeding most states.
The whole structure rests on the Insular Cases, the early‑1900s Supreme Court doctrine holding that unincorporated territories belong to but are not part of the United States.
That reasoning is now criticized across the ideological spectrum, including by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has called for the cases to be overruled.
The courts have largely declined to revisit that foundation for a century. Until they do, or until Congress and the territory settle the status question, the arrangement described above is the arrangement.
Why the territory keeps re‑electing
Return to the arithmetic. Twenty‑seven terms, five people, and three of them holding twenty‑five.
In a chamber where you cannot vote on final passage, what you can accumulate is seniority — committee assignments, subcommittee gavels, and the relationships that let you attach a territorial provision to somebody else's bill. De Lugo needed roughly a decade to reach a subcommittee chairmanship. Christian‑Christensen needed years to build her position on health policy. Plaskett's committee assignments and her 2021 impeachment role came in her third and fourth terms, not her first.
Christian‑Christensen has made this argument directly: seniority matters, and the electorate appears to understand that. Long tenure in this particular seat is not incumbency protection so much as a rational strategy for a jurisdiction whose representative starts every Congress at a structural disadvantage.
Which is what makes the open seat consequential. Whoever wins on November 3 arrives in January 2027 as the most junior member of a chamber where they cannot cast a decisive vote, at a moment when the Committee of the Whole privilege is not in effect. The clock starts over.
The 2026 race
The seat is open for only the fourth time since it was created — after de Lugo's 1978 departure, after his 1994 retirement, after Christian‑Christensen's 2014 departure, and now.
Ten candidates filed by the May deadline. The Democratic primary is August 1. The general election is November 3.
Two questions are worth putting to every candidate, and neither has much to do with the usual campaign material:
- What committee do you want, and why that one? For a delegate, the committee assignment is the job. A candidate who has not thought about which committee actually touches Virgin Islands policy — natural resources, transportation, appropriations subcommittees with territorial jurisdiction — has not thought about the office.
- What is your position on the Committee of the Whole? Delegates have spent thirty years watching this privilege appear and vanish. There are legislative approaches to making it permanent, and there are broader status questions behind it. Candidates should be asked whether they intend to spend capital on the structural question or treat it as background noise.
The bottom line
The Virgin Islands has had a voice in Congress for 54 years and a vote for none of them. It has filled the seat with remarkable continuity — five people, three of them serving a combined 25 terms — because continuity is the only lever the office reliably provides.
That continuity ends in January. The territory is about to hand its single federal seat to someone starting from zero, in a Congress that has not extended delegates even the symbolic vote, at a time when federal decisions on disaster recovery, health funding and tax policy land hard here.
The history above is not a nostalgia exercise. It is the job description. Voters going to the polls on August 1 and November 3 are choosing not just a representative but the opening move in a decade‑long accumulation — assuming, as the record suggests, that they intend to keep whoever they pick.
Sources
- U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Historian, biographical profile of Ron de Lugo
- Congressional Research Service, Parliamentary Rights of the Delegates and Resident Commissioner from Puerto Rico (R40170)
- Congressional Research Service, Delegates to the U.S. Congress: History and Current Status (R40555)
- Congressional Research Service, Delegates and the Resident Commissioner: Parliamentary Rights and Practice, 113th–117th Congresses (R48063)
- Public Law 92‑271, enacted April 10, 1972
- Michel v. Anderson, 817 F. Supp. 126 (D.D.C. 1993), aff'd 14 F.3d 623 (D.C. Cir. 1994)
- Biographical Directory of the United States Congress; Congress.gov member records for the Virgin Islands
- St. Thomas Source, "VI Delegates Have Been Knocking on Washington's Door for 50 Years," November 5, 2022
- St. Thomas Source, obituary and career retrospective of Ron de Lugo, July 14, 2020
- St. Thomas Source, "Filing Deadline Locks In Crowded 2026 Election Field," May 19, 2026
- Ballotpedia, U.S. Virgin Islands Delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives
- Guampedia, Guam Congressional Representation Act of 1972
