Citizenship Test Answers for District of Columbia
Four of the 128 civics questions depend on where you live. Here is how to answer them if you live in District of Columbia.
D.C. is not a state. On the civics test, D.C. residents answer that D.C. has no U.S. senators, that D.C. does not have a governor, and that D.C. is not a state and does not have a capital.
62. What is the capital of your state?
Answer for District of Columbia
District of Columbia is not a state and does not have a state capital. On the test, say exactly that.
The capital answer does not change. Every name on this page is checked each night against the congressional record and, for governors, two independent public records, and a name is left out rather than printed when the sources disagree.
23. Who is one of your state's U.S. senators now?
Answer for District of Columbia
District of Columbia has no U.S. senators. Saying so is the correct answer.
29. Name your U.S. representative.
District of Columbia's Delegate now
Eleanor Holmes Norton
Find your representative at house.gov
Residents of territories with nonvoting Delegates or Resident Commissioners may provide the name of that Delegate or Commissioner. Also acceptable is any statement that the territory has no (voting) representatives in Congress.
61. Who is the governor of your state now?
Answer for District of Columbia
District of Columbia does not have a governor. Saying so is the correct answer.
Background on District of Columbia
Washington, D.C. is not a state, and that one fact drives all four answers on this page: the district has no U.S. senators, no governor, and no state capital, and residents are told to answer exactly that. It was created under the Constitution as a federal seat of government, on land given up by Maryland, so that the national capital would not sit inside any state. Residents pay federal taxes and serve in the military but have no voting representation in Congress; a nonvoting delegate speaks for the district in the House. The Twenty-third Amendment, ratified in 1961, gave it 3 electoral votes in presidential elections, which it had never had before. Statehood has been proposed repeatedly and would take an act of Congress.
This background section is written by US Citizenship Test Practice. It is not part of the USCIS question list, and it names no senator, representative or governor itself: those names change with elections, so they appear only in the answers above, which are checked every night.
The other 124 questions
Everything else on the civics test is the same no matter where you live.