Maggie Astor, a political reporter for The Times, recently traveled to North Dakota to report on a voter ID law that might keep Native Americans away from the polls. She sent us this story, about experiencing the issue firsthand:

I spent three days last week in North Dakota reporting on the voter ID law there, which requires residential addresses. Many Native Americans don’t have residential addresses, and the problem was driven home for me by what should have been a very simple task: getting to one of the reservations to report.

I didn’t have enough cell service in North Dakota to use Google Maps, so I rented a GPS unit with my car. It took me to the city limits of Fort Totten, the seat of the Spirit Lake Reservation — and then it stopped. It told me I had arrived at the tribe’s administrative offices. I was actually in the middle of a remote highway, with a lake on one side and fields on the other.

I had just enough service to make a call, so I pulled over and called OJ Semans, of the Native American voting rights group Four Directions, whom I was meeting at the office. He named some landmarks the GPS might be able to find, but it couldn’t find any of them.

What we ended up doing was almost comical. I told OJ the lake was on my left, which told him which direction I was facing. He went to a spot where he could see the highway, and he started describing the oncoming cars. The amount of time that passed between him describing one and me seeing it told us how far away I was. I put my flashers on to identify my car, and when he finally saw it, he told me to turn.

All’s well that ends well — until a few hours later, when I drove to the Turtle Mountain Reservation in Belcourt and the same thing happened again.

This is the heart of the problem. Even tribal headquarters, the biggest buildings in town, don’t always have addresses. As state officials have noted, addresses can be assigned, and many have been. But the sheer scope of their absence tells you what a huge task it is.