Troy Heinert, South Dakota’s new state Senate minority leader, is also a rodeo pickup rider and member of the Rosebud Sioux. (Photo by Randy Heinert)

The Right To Vote

The enthusiastic participation of Native voters in 2018 was as significant as the surge of Native elected officials. Though 2018 election data by ethnicity was not yet out at press time, there were reports of high turnout on reservations.

If the Democratic Party wants to stay relevant in these changing times, it needs to listen to Native voices, says OJ Semans. He and his wife, Barb, codirect Four Directions, a voting-rights group headquartered in South Dakota on the Rosebud Sioux reservation. Both are tribal members.

“Yes, we Native American Indians are mostly Democrats, in some areas nearly exclusively so, but that’s not the point,” he says. “We want the political parties to interact with tribal members. Tell us what you’re about and what you’re going to do. Let us decide.”

Overwhelming support in Indian country tipped Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester to re-election in a Trump state. Semans says Tester earned that support with field offices on reservations: “He talked to us. The critical issue for us is not the party, but equality: the equal right to vote guaranteed by the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act.”

Native Americans have been U.S. citizens for less than a century—since the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924—and couldn’t vote in some states for decades longer, explains University of Utah political science professor Daniel McCool in Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act and the Right to Vote. “To achieve that, Indians would have to overcome a panoply of state laws, constitutional clauses and court decisions that blocked the way.”

Americans have periodically stepped up to expand and protect voting rights, with the civil-rights marches of the 1960s and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, for example. For Native people, scores of federal lawsuits since the 1960s—notably by the Native American Rights Fund, Four Directions and the American Civil Liberties Union—have won them better ballot-box access. There have been steps backward, though, as when a 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby v. Holder, eliminated a key protection for voters. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the decision swept away Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which had required federal approval of changes in voting procedures in jurisdictions with a history of discrimination.

In 2018, North Dakota took another big step backward. The nation was agog at the conservative state’s last-ditch attempt to keep typically Democratic Native Americans from the polls. When North Dakota required that voting IDs have detailed street-address information that is usually not available for reservation residences, tribes and advocacy groups (including Four Directions) scrambled to put the data in place. The suppression effort ended up energizing the Native vote and driving turnout; on the Standing Rock reservation, for example, turnout doubled from the last midterm election.

Semans sees the ID laws as “overt” vote suppression, but also sees “covert” suppression in poll workers giving misinformation. In the 2018 midterms, one Four Directions volunteer witnessed a county official refuse to accept a Native voter’s in-person absentee ballot, telling them they had to go home and mail it (which was untrue). On another day, Semans personally witnessed a poll worker tell a Native voter that a document was invalid because it had been signed in black ink, rather than blue. That, too, was untrue; black ink is valid. “To cast a ballot in North Dakota, Native voters had to know the details of voting-rights law backwards and forwards,” Semans says.

John Arnold, North Dakota’s state elections director, claims that the new ID requirements were not intended to discriminate. Problems should be taken up with the counties where they occurred, he says, where local officials should have “had the sense to know” correct procedures.

Semans disagrees. “State and local election officials took an oath to administer fair and democratic elections,” he says. “They’re not. The bar has to be raised.”

He believes election officials closest to the voting process—county workers across the country who decide where the voting offices will be, who staffs them, their hours and much more—are where the power lies. It’s where the proponents of the racial and financial privilege that Shelton describes are fighting their last-ditch battles against Native and other minority voters.

In an important development, Crow Creek tribal resident Yvette Isburg garnered 56 percent of the vote to become head elections official in Buffalo County, S.D., which had a history of extreme gerrymandering. Some 14 years ago, the county settled a federal lawsuit that found it packed 1,500-plus Crow Creek Sioux Tribe members into one county-commission district, while 100-plus and 300-plus mostly non-Native residents made up the other two districts. The districts were evened up, and now a Native woman will be sworn in March 4 to the influential role of ensuring fair and equal elections. She will monitor the point at which voters register, vote and otherwise interact personally with the nation’s election system.

Four Directions is already working toward 2020. The group is looking outside North Dakota, talking to tribes in Arizona and in other swing states. “Navajo has a total of some 115,000 voting-age citizens across three states, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah—with 70,000 in Arizona alone,” Semans says. “We are opening the doors for them.” The organization aims to establish 15 early-voting offices on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, where there were only three in 2016.

In Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, Native voters—if they get to the polls—can affect the presidential contest, Semans says. “We are looking at Denver,” he adds, “doing field surveys and seeing how we can make a difference for its urban-Indian population. North Carolina has 60,000 Lumbees. We are talking to them.” The Democratic Party may well benefit from the increased Native voter turnout, he says, but for tribal people it will likely mean more Native officeholders in federal, state and local seats.

Voting is critically important for Native people, says Heinert. “Voting is how we exercise our sovereignty. We are here, we are part of the process. We’ve been an afterthought, and that’s not the case anymore.”

Stephanie Woodard is an award-winning journalist who has reported investigative articles for In These Times. Her new book is American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle for Self-Determination and Inclusion.

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