Native American Voter Suppression
By Victoria Lydon
(Each year RockScissorsPaper publishes the winners of the James Strickland Award for Writing. Named after an honored colleague and SRU Professor Emeritus, these award-winning essays have been submitted by SRU English faculty and winners have been determined by SRU English Department Faculty, the College of Liberal Arts, and Professor Strickland himself. The following essay was the winner for the 2020-2021 academic year. Professor Strickland noted the following in selecting this essay as our winner: “The essay began with a challenging thought–what if our voting rights were endangered by the very people elected to protect our rights, and then proceeded to explain the different laws and conditions that have led to the disenfranchisement of Native American voters. I liked how it wasn’t just Lydon’s ideas; she brought in other voices to speak in quotations from lawyers and journalists to support her arguments. Lydon had a solid conclusion that summarized what she said, but before that, she took the time to present what counter-arguments might be offered and tackled them as well.” ~James Strickland. Congratulations to the winner of this year’s scholarship!)
What would we do if our right to vote was continually infringed upon by the government and officials that promised to protect our rights? This is the reality for Native Americans who have been perpetually stifled by the government. Natives are citizens of the United States of America, and all citizens deserve an equal opportunity to vote for leaders of the country.
Although Native Americans were granted equal voting rights by 1962, research shows that Native American voters are being unjustly suppressed by the government. There are many laws and factors that have contributed and continue to contribute to unjust Native American voter suppression in the United States.
Native Americans were the last group of people in the United States to gain citizenship and the rights that come with it. Citizenship was finally granted to Natives with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, but the right to vote was not guaranteed. States were allowed to determine voting rights, which resulted in all Native American citizens gaining the right to vote by 1962. Despite their now equal voting rights, there were many laws and officials that disenfranchised and prevented Native Americans from voting. Alora Thomas-Lundborg, the senior staff attorney for the ACLU Voting Rights Project and Lilian Alvernaz, the Indigenous Justice Legal Fellow for ACLU Montana highlighted a historical law that contributed to Native American voter disenfranchisement. They found that “… in 1937 Montana passed a law requiring that all voters be taxpayers. Because Native Americans living on reservations were exempt from some local taxes, they could not register to vote. These laws remained on the books until 1975” (Thomas-Lundborg and Alvernaz 2). Native Americans had to continually fight for equal rights.
While there have historically been many obstacles set forth by the government to infringe on Native American voters, there are many impediments that are faced today. Voter ID laws, unreliable mail services, low polling locations, online registration issues, and discriminatory laws are some of the main issues Native voters face today. In some states tribal IDs aren’t accepted or a residential address is required. Many Native Americans don’t have residential addresses because reservations don’t use an address system, and many Natives are impoverished and do not have a permanent residence. The blatant racism highlighted by Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, the director of the Indian Legal Clinic at Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and a voting rights attorney, shows, “Even if a tribal member has an ID with an address … the ID may have a P.O. box or descriptive address. Nontraditional addresses do not fit into county database systems, resulting in counties reassigning addresses to voters. This may result in the ID being rejected due to insufficient poll worker training or because it does not match the residential address in the voter file. (4)”
ID laws that limit and target Native voters are unfair and are only one of many hurdles Native voters must overcome. Another obstacle that current Native voters face is the hardships with registration and voting methods. There is often very unreliable or nonexistent internet services on rural reservations. That makes it hard for Native Americans to register to vote online. It is not easy to register in person either because of the long distances to their county election office, and lack of transportation to get there. If a Native can overcome the task of registering, then they have to decide how they will vote. Mail-in ballots are not a reliable option, and neither is in person voting for many Native Americans. Mail on a reservation is very untrustworthy and can take a long time on top of the long distances to pick up mail and the lack of addresses. According to Nina Lakhani, an environmental justice reporter, “… most reservations do not have home mail delivery. Instead, people need to travel to post offices or postal provide sites – little places that offer minimal mail services and are located in places like gas stations and mini-marts … Not a single PO box on the Navajo Nation has 24-hour access” (2,3). The undependable mail renders mail-in voting useless for many Native Americans. In person voting is a similar situation. Many reservations have low numbers of polling locations available that are often very far. It is not fair to make people travel an overwhelming number of miles just to exercise their right to vote.
Marco della Cava, a national correspondent and technology writer, mentioned, “In Arizona, Navajos have just one polling location per 306 square miles compared with one per 13 square miles for Scottsdale residents, according to the Four Directions advocacy group” (5). It seems very intentional and discriminatory by the government that the Native Americans have fewer polling locations set up to utilize than the predominately white neighborhood. Native voters face a myriad of hardships with registering to vote and choosing a voting method.
The Covid-19 pandemic has added a major hinderance to Native American voting in the 2020 presidential election. According to Marco della Cava, “COVID-19 has disproportionately sickened or killed Native Americans across the U.S., creating another Election Day challenge for a poor and geographically isolated population already fighting to overcome steep voting barriers ranging from discriminatory election laws to distant polling stations” (1). The Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the entire country and world. It made voting hard for all people, especially the Native American population. Covid-19 restrictions by the government limited voting options further, disproportionately affecting the already suppressed Natives.
The federal and state governments contribute to the suppression of Native voters. The federal government and the Supreme Court have made decisions that greatly impacted Native Americans’ voting rights. The deconstruction of protections provided by the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court allowed states with past racial prejudices to be allowed to pass discriminatory laws without federal approval (Thomas-Lundborg and Alvernaz 4). Local governments also suppress Natives. In Montana there is a law that passed called the Ballot Interference Prevention Act. BIPA, as it is also known, is very detrimental to the Native voters and resulted in residents on reservations not being able to vote. According to Alora Thomas- Lundborg and Lillian Alvernaz, BIPA restricts ballot collection to six per person, resulting in fines or prison time for violations. The law violates many of the Montana state constitution’s rights and is vague (3,4). The Ballot Interference Prevention Act is one of many laws that targets Native voters. A shocking piece of evidence that Anna V. Smith, an assistant editor for High Country News, detected that is very effective in communicating how the government is suppressing Native American voters is called cracking. She stated,
“… the strategies of state redistricting plans that use a method called ‘cracking’ to split a reservation into different voter districts, diluting voting strength. ‘Cracked’ districts create a majority of non-Native voters despite a substantial Native population. The Yakama Nation in the Pacific Northwest was ‘cracked’ into two districts: When a Yakama citizen ran for state Legislature in 2012, half the tribal members couldn’t vote for him.” (Smith 2)
Cracking is used by the government to weaken the Native Americans’ votes and is completely unethical. The federal and state governments are evidently creating laws that are aimed at restraining the Native American voters from executing their rights and stifling their power.
Some people believe that Native American voters are not being suppressed by the government and have equal voting rights to all other citizens. It is argued that the laws that can have a negative effect on Native voters are not specifically targeted at the purpose of disenfranchising Native Americans. However, it is clear that the laws and obstacles are set to harm the Native Americans’ right to vote and diminish the power they hold.
There is strong evidence of unjust suppression of Native American voters by the government, despite the equal voting rights granted. Laws and decisions made by the federal and state governments negatively impact the right to vote for the minority group, Native Americans. Voter ID laws, polling locations, unreliable mail and internet, and discriminatory laws all contribute to the inequitable violation of the voting right of the Native American citizens in the United States. Native Americans were the first people to live on this land and deserve enough respect to have an equal opportunity to exercise their rights.
Works Cited
Cava, Marco della. “Native Americans Battle COVID-19 and Other Voting Obstacles as Election Day Nears.” USA TODAY, 25 Oct. 2020,
eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/10/25/native-american-voters-covid-19-adds- existing-hurdles-2020/3671925001.
Ferguson-Bohnee, Patty. “How the Native American Vote Continues to Be Suppressed.” American Bar Association, 9 Feb. 2020, www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/voting- rights/how-the-native-american-vote-continues-to-be-suppressed.
Lakhani, Nina. “How Native Americans’ Right to Vote Has Been Systematically Violated for Generations.” Guardian, Guardian News & Media Limited, 16 Oct. 2020, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/16/native-americans-voting-rights-mail-in- ballots-us-elections.
Smith, Anna. “Report: Indigenous Voters Face Racism and Suppression.” High Country News, 1 June 2020, www.hcn.org/issues/52.6/indigenous-affairs-election-2020-report-indigenous- voters-face-racism-and-suppression.
Thomas-Lundborg, Alora, and Lillian Alvernaz. “This Law Makes Voting Nearly Impossible for Native Americans in Montana.” American Civil Liberties Union, 12 Mar. 2020, www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/this-law-makes-voting-nearly-impossible-for-native- americans-in-montana.
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