Monday, June 8, 2020 | 2 a.m.
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In South Dakota, a Native American community of 1,200 people is provided with only one voting site, and residents aren’t given the option of early voting or early registration.
Yet nearby, a non-Native community of just 12 people is provided with its own polling location, as well as early voting and early registration.
Inequities like this pepper a new report on the voting rights of indigenous peoples. The findings should be required reading for every elected leader.
Produced by the Colorado-based Native American Rights Fund, the 176-page report examines indigenous people’s voting rights in 17 states and finds that Native American communities face an appalling array of hurdles in exercising their right to vote. The report is aptly titled, “Obstacles at Every Turn.”
In most cases, these are formal barriers established by Republican Party leaders on reservations and in minority communities nationwide to suppress the vote among those Americans.
Among them:
• Intentionally inconvenient placement of polling sites, which are often located at great distances from reservations
• Denial of requests to establish voting centers on reservations, based on unfair population thresholds
• Rejection of tribal IDs by election officials, and refusal to acknowledge nontraditional mailing address formats that are used on some reservations
• A lack of effort by officials to education voters about the voting process, provide aid in registration, offer language assistance on ballots or voter guides, etc.
• Gerrymandering that splits Native American communities, designed partly to hurt the chances of candidates from those areas to win elections
• Refusal to adapt to nontraditional residential addressing formats that are used on some reservations
• Voter intimidation, such as surrounding polling places in Native communities with police.
Disenfranchisement efforts like these are designed not only to make it difficult to vote, but also to create a chilling effect on registration. And unfortunately, it’s working, the report’s authors say, as an estimated 1 million voting-eligible Native Americans aren’t registered.
That’s a travesty for which the lion’s share of the blame falls on the Republican Party.
A case in point is playing out in Montana, where Native Americans are being adversely affected by a 2018 law proposed by conservatives as a protection against voter fraud. The legislation is pointless, given that study after study has revealed that fraud is exceedingly rare. The law severely restricts who can collect ballots and limits how many those individuals can collect. This disproportionately affects Native American voters, many of whom live in remote locations and quite sensibly rely on community members or organizers to collect and deliver large numbers of ballots.
For Nevada, the good news is that our state fares relatively well in the study, especially Southern Nevada. But lack of conveniently located polling places and early voting plagues some areas, so there’s work to be done.
Nevadans also can address the problem by supporting the congressional Native American Voting Rights Act, which was introduced in the House in 2018 and again in 2019. The legislation, which is cosponsored by Nevada Reps. Dina Titus and Susie Lee, provides $10 million in annual federal funding through 2035 for a grant program to address the needs of indigenous voters.
It’s a commendable piece of legislation, and badly needed. As the new report points out, the shameful disenfranchisement of Native Americans must be remedied.
To read the report, visit vote.narf.org/obstacles-at-every-turn.
