North Dakota now has a voter ID law that requires residents to show identification with a current street address. A post office box does not qualify.
Since many Native American reservations do not use physical street addresses and Native Americans are over represented in the homeless population, Native residents often use P.O. boxes for their mailing addresses, and may rely on tribal identification that doesn’t list an address.
The North Dakota law decided that tribal ID cards will not be valid in the general mid-term election, although they were fine for the primaries.
If residents of North Dakota, including Native and non-Native eligible voters, do not have residential addresses on their IDs, voting will be difficult. They have to bring supplemental documentation, like utility bills, but about 18,000 residents of North Dakota don’t have those documents either.
Because in North Dakota every resident is eligible to vote without advance voter registration, people may only find out they cannot vote when they show up to vote.
Native Americans tend to vote for Democrats.
A judge initially overturned the law because the voter fraud it was created to stop was “virtually non-existent”, and the case ended up before the Supreme Court which declined to overturn North Dakota’s voter ID law.
That decision came less than a month before Election Day.
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Interestingly one of the tribes affected by this law is the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe who people paying attention to the news should recognize as the tribe that protested the Dakota Access Pipeline going through their historically sacred land and endangering their water supply.
Living on the state’s reservations without an address is in accordance with the law and treaties. So while honoring the law and the treaties, what’s in there is being used to curtail the Native Americans’ ability to vote.
With just weeks left before the mid-term elections, the state says that residents without a street ID should contact their county’s 911 coordinator to get a free street address and a letter confirming the address.
This is cumbersome and confusing, and one might wonder if it is supposed to be.
South Dakota’s Rosebud Sioux Tribe, therefore, is working with tribal leaders in North Dakota to have a tribal government official available at every polling place on the reservations to issue a tribal voting letter that includes the eligible voter’s name, date of birth, and residential address.
A 2016 Harvard Law Review study found that Native Americans routinely face hurdles exercising their right to vote and securing representation with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was only a partial solution to the problem.
Traditionally favoring Democrats in elections and opposing the pipeline.
Any guess why a Republican heavy state government is making voting difficult for Native Americans?