North Dakota’s state constitution does not require the governor and other officials to swear in, conflicting with the US constitution. This discrepancy may exclude North Dakota from being a US state, making it a territory until an amendment is passed.
There is conflicting language between the North Dakota state constitution and the US constitution, so technically, North Dakota may not be a US state. Article XI of the United States Constitution requires a state to swear in its governor and many other high officials; The North Dakota state constitution does not have this requirement, which could technically exclude him from the state. Author John Rolczynski, the man who discovered the discrepancy in 1995, believes North Dakota is still technically a territory and will remain so until its legislature passes an amendment. The vote on the adoption of the amendment was scheduled for November 2012.
Learn more about North Dakota and statehood:
The United States has five unincorporated territories: Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. There is also another essentially unoccupied territory, Palmyra Atoll, which is an “incorporated unorganized territory” south of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.
Aside from North Dakota, the last two incorporated organized territories recognized were the Territory of Alaska and the Territory of Hawaii, both of which became states in 1959.
Although North Dakota is the 19th largest state in the United States, it is the third least populated, with only about 670,000 residents.
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