Chanting “We demand the vote!” almost a hundred people rallied near the Capitol on Veterans Day to protest D.C.’s lack of voting representation in Congress.

Members of D.C. Vote, a D.C. voting rights advocacy group, said they held the rally Tuesday on behalf of the veterans and soldiers who live in the District.

“Our D.C. soldiers who are fighting in Iraq are fighting for the same freedoms that they are denied here at home,” said Aviva Kempner, a member of D.C. Vote.

Next to a sign that said 192,000 D.C. residents have served their country, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., noted the injustice of people fighting for a country that does not give them the same congressional representation that is afforded to citizens of the other 50 states.

“It is a disgrace that our soldiers go off and fight for this country, but come home and do not have a vote,” Norton said. “We are supposed to take care of our soldiers when they come home from war.”

Norton, now in her ninth term as the District’s nonvoting member of the House of Representatives, will introduce the Voting Rights Act of 2009 as her first bill in the 111th Congress next year. Norton has fought in recent years to secure the District a vote in the House and came close to passing a bill last year.

Norton said she will dedicate the bill to the first D.C. soldier who died in the Iraq War, Darryl Dent. She said Dent “died assuring the vote for Iraqi citizens, a right he did not live to see for himself.”

During the afternoon rally, several veterans also took the stage to add their voices to the call for representation. Hector Rodriguez, a Vietnam War veteran, explained his plight.

“I was awarded a medal labeled ‘Defending Freedom Safeguards America,’ ” Rodriguez said. “But when I came here to Washington, D.C., I no longer had the freedom which I fought and was awarded for.”

Rodriguez said veterans and residents of D.C. will soon have representation, however.

“We have friends now in Congress,” he said. “Even President Obama has stated that he will support our Voting Rights Act of 2009, once introduced.”

Some do not think Norton’s efforts with the Voting Rights Act of 2009 will go far enough.

David Schwartzman, a national delegate to the D.C. Statehood Green Party, called the D.C. Vote approach a “sellout.”

“The only way for full representation of D.C. would be through a constitutional amendment which would guarantee two voting senators and a vote in the House,” Schwartzman said. “The Voting Bills Act of 2009 will only postpone the real problems of representation, but a constitutional amendment would virtually guarantee representation.”