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Could The War On Native Voting Rights Swing The Senate?

Could The War On Native Voting Rights Swing The Senate?

The following is excerpted from “The Missing Native Vote,” Stephanie Woodard’s cover story in the July 2014 issue of In These Times. Woodard explains how, nearly 50 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, American Indians still lack equal access to the ballot box — and how, depending on the outcome of a federal lawsuit, the war on their voting rights could swing control of the U.S. Senate.

You can read the full piece here.

It was mid-April, and Montana was gearing up for this year’s primary election. Voting would get underway in Big Sky Country on May 5, with a month of advance voting by absentee ballot — by mail or by delivering a ballot to the county courthouse — leading up to Primary Day on June 3. If people hadn’t registered, they could head to the courthouse to sign up.

But for Ed “Buster” Moore, who lives on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in north-central Montana, it wasn’t so simple. To cast a ballot during the absentee-voting period, he would have to make the 126-mile round trip to the Blaine County Courthouse in Chinook. That’s about $21 worth of gas, not to mention the income that Moore, an artisan, would lose by taking a half-day off from his work making hand drums, rawhide bags and other items that he sells in the community and on the Internet. A diabetic, he’d have to buy lunch on the road. Those expenses add up.

If he had to vote today? “I couldn’t afford it,” Moore says. For tribal members who are unemployed or receiving assistance, voting would be impossible, he says. “It’s sheer economics.”

Moore’s situation isn’t unusual. Though measures that curtail minorities’ voting rights, such as stringent ID requirements and limited voting time, have made headlines in recent years, the challenges Native Americans face when they go to the polls have never been on the national radar. In the second decade of the 21st century, nearly 50 years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed discriminatory voting practices, American Indians are still working to obtain equal voting rights.

Montanans can register to vote during the month preceding elections — but there’s a catch. The courthouses where they register are in largely white-inhabited county seats, not on reservations. In the nation’s fourth largest state — at 147,040 square miles, bigger than Germany — that can mean daylong trips for people like Moore from isolated reservations.

And that’s just registration. The month-long voting period is supposed to make casting a ballot easier, and hundreds of thousands of Montanans take advantage of it. In 2012, 42.5 percent of voters either mailed in an absentee ballot or voted in person during the month leading up to Primary Day, according to state election results. In-person voting, however, is only allowed at those same county courthouses, a long way from reservations. And voting by mail poses its own difficulties, thanks to unreliable postal service on reservations. For Native people, casting a ballot in Montana can be a multi-day event.

The distance between reservations and county courthouses isn’t just an inconvenience; for many Natives, that distance can mean the difference between voting and not voting. Johnathan Walker, student body president of Fort Belknap’s Aaniiih Nakoda College and an avid participant in get-out-the-vote efforts, recalls one 85-year-old woman who missed her opportunity to vote because Walker was unable to secure transportation for her to the courthouse.

To measure the impact of these hurdles, a 2014 report by Jean Schroedel, a professor of political science at Claremont Graduate University, examined voting methods used in the 2012 general election in three Montana counties that overlap reservations. In Blaine County, she found, 46 percent of voters in white precincts cast absentee ballots. Meanwhile, just 18 percent did so in Indian precincts. The proportions were similar elsewhere in the state.

None of this adds up to equal rights, according to former Fort Belknap tribal president and cultural leader William “Snuffy” Main. “Indians have one day to vote, assuming they’ve registered ahead of time, and everyone else has a month,” says Main, a board member of the Native voting-rights nonprofit Four Directions. As Mark Azure, Fort Belknap’s current tribal president, puts it, “I would love to walk out the door, cross the street, cast my vote and get back to my life — and not have to take half a day and go off the reservation to a town where I know that … I’m not really welcome.”

He may soon be able to do just that, thanks to a federal lawsuit led by Mark Wandering Medicine, a Northern Cheyenne spiritual leader and Vietnam veteran who would have to travel 180 miles round trip to get to a county courthouse. The case, Wandering Medicine v. McCulloch, pits plaintiffs from three Montana reservations — Fort Belknap, Northern Cheyenne and Crow — against county elections officials and the secretary of state and top elections officer, Linda McCulloch. The plaintiffs demand equal access on their reservations to the absentee voting and late registration currently offered only in county courthouses.

To read the rest of the story, click here.

Stephanie Woodard is an award-winning journalist whose articles on American Indian rights and other topics have been published by many national publications and news sites.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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Report: GOP-Pushed War On Voting Could Impact More Than Five Million Americans

A comprehensive new study by the Brennan Center for Justice is shedding light on a troubling new set of electoral laws that tighten restrictions on who can vote in the United States and how they can do it. The wave of new laws — almost all of which were sponsored and supported by Republican state legislators — promise to impact more than 5 million voters, the majority of whom are young, minority, and low-income voters, and many of the laws seem to be motivated by partisan politics.

Bills requiring photo ID to vote have been introduced in 34 states this year alone. The GOP has long raised vague concerns about “voter fraud” — during the 2008 election, the activist group ACORN was constantly blamed, without much evidence, for trying to steal the election on Obama’s behalf — but the push to wall off citizens from the ballot box has been turbocharged since the Tea Party-dominated Republican Party swept through last fall’s elections.

Seven states — Alabama, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin — have passed restrictive voter ID laws, with Republicans spearheading all but the Rhode Island bill. Texas goes as far to allow concealed weapons licensees for voting, but bars the use of student IDs. Similarly, in Wisconsin’s bill originally banned the use of student IDs to vote, but has since been amended to permit student IDs that meet a strict criteria. As a result, the University of Wisconsin system must spend and estimated $1.1 million to issue new ID cards to be used for voting purposes.

The bills threaten the voting rights of more than 21 million American citizens who do not posses a government-issued photo ID — remember, a Social Security card doesn’t count — and they are likely to especially affect the kind of low-income voters who tend to support Democrats. In Colorado, a bill that required voters to provide proof of citizenship struck many as anti-immigrant scare tactics, especially after critics debunked Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s that up to 11,805 non-citizens were registered to vote. Even if the false number was accurate, however, it’s still a tiny of fraction of the population in a state where more than 1.5 million people voted in last fall’s U.S. Senate election.

Other new laws are focused on making it more difficult to register to vote. Republican legislators in seven states have proposed bills that would sharply restrict voter registration drives by adding several layers of bureaucratic regulation to voter registration groups. So far the bills have been signed into law in Texas and Florida, and the impact has been felt immediately: Shortly after the Florida bill’s enactment, the all-volunteer Florida League of Women Voters shut down its operations in the state, declaring that the new law “imposes an undue burden on groups such as ours that work to register voters.”

According to U.S. Census Bureau data from the 2004 and 2008 election cycles, African-American and Hispanic citizens are more than twice as likely to register to vote through the type of voter registration drives that the Florida and Texas laws target. The new flurry of bills detailed in the report, which also include restrictions on early voting and crackdowns on the ability to sign up to vote on election day, are why former President Bill Clinton told the Brennan Center that Republicans “are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like that 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate.”

And it’s proof that elections have consequences. The United States has been steadily tearing down barriers to voting over the past few decades, but much of that progress has been undone in the brief time since the 2010 elections. It surely cannot be a coincidence that about a quarter of the bills have been introduced by newly elected Republicans. If newly elected legislators cannot find solutions to their constituents economic problems, they can always do the next best thing: making it harder for their constituents to vote them out of office.