Last of two parts
The first part is at thevoice.us/native-americans-right-to-vote-among-the-most-violated
Native Americans’ right to vote has been systematically violated for generations.
In the new book, Voting in Indian Country, The View from the Trenches, Jean Reith Schroedel weaves together historical and contemporary voting rights’ conflicts on the eve of the November 3 elections. She is professor emerita of political science at Claremont Graduate University, in Claremont, Calif..
“Preliminary data from my new research shows that all the mail sent from post offices off-reservation arrived at the election office within one to three days, whereas approximately half sent from the reservation took three to 10 days. Rural whites are doing a whole lot better than rural Native Americans. This isn’t the only challenge: South Dakota requires mail ballots to be notarized, but there are no notaries on reservations. And the level of trust in voting is generally low among Native Americans, but drops dramatically when asked about voting by mail.
“Are Native Americans denied the right to vote because of ID requirements mandated by some states, supposedly to curtail voter fraud?
“It can make it very difficult for people who live on reservations where many roads don’t have names or numbers – so-called non-standard addresses, which are very problematic in states requiring IDs with residential addresses. States such as South Dakota have chosen to make it a felony offense with prison terms and fines if someone votes using an address different to the one given to register, even though unstable housing is a big issue on reservations, and people crash in different places all the time.
“Will Native Americans who only have tribal ID be refused the vote?
“Tribal ID has not been accepted in a number of states in the past, including North Dakota and Minnesota. In some places the problem is that the tribal ID may not have a residential street address, because those do not exist on many reservations, or that government entities have in their records an address that was arbitrarily assigned to people with non-standard addresses, and that address does not match another assigned address on a different government list. But with respect to the upcoming election, we honestly won’t know how big an issue it is until people try to vote.
“We’ve heard about felony disenfranchisement in black communities, especially in states such as Florida. Does this impact Native Americans, too?
“It’s a major unstudied issue, but what we do know is that laws passed after Reconstruction (in the 1870s) and the VRA (Voting Rights Act), 1965, specifically to disenfranchise African Americans were passed in places which didn’t have black people. For example, Idaho put in place felony disenfranchisement when it became a state, at a time when census data shows there were only 88 black people. It was designed to disenfranchise Native people. Half the states with harshest felony disenfranchisement don’t have many black people, but have big Native Americans, or Latino populations.
“Why are the Dakotas so important in the struggle for equality at the ballot box?
“The Dakotas are the heart of what was the great Sioux Nations, who put together a cross-nation resistance to the incursion by Europeans, U.S. military and militias. It’s a flashpoint where some of the worst massacres took place and it’s been one of the worst places for suppression of the Native American vote. North Dakota has passed one law after another that made it harder for people to vote, which I think [most recently] was a retaliation to further disenfranchise Native people for standing up against the Dakota Access pipeline.
“In South Dakota, more than a quarter of the 2016 registered voters in Todd County, which is the Rosebud Sioux, had been purged by 2020. It is huge. Todd County is an unorganized county, so the administration of elections is handled by an adjacent white county. These are red states, so little donor money goes into voting rights, but the white population is aging, and younger whites are leaving the State. It’s going to be fascinating to watch how the Dakotas deal with the much larger Native American voting population in the next 10 years.
“Which are the states to watch in the 2020 election for potential voter suppression of Native American votes?
“Arizona. because it is a swing state and has all of the above issues; Montana, which can be considered a success story in regard to Native American representation in recent years, but a lack of in-person voting could have a big impact. Alaska and Nevada have issues, and of course the Dakotas.