The Independent View: The Missing Native American Vote

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.

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 Montana, you can register to vote during the month preceding elections, but there’s a catch. The courthouses where Native Americans' 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 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.

This time, however, the Native people have the United States on their side: Wandering Medicine has attracted the interest of the Department of Justice, which views the suit as an important test of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and has taken it up as part of its efforts to ensure equal rights nationwide.

A ruling for the Native plaintiffs would mean equality for Native voters — and possibly for other isolated minority communities, such as Latinos in the Southwest.

To determine how distance and poverty affect Native voting access, the DOJ asked University of Wyoming geography professor Gerald R. Webster to examine the three Montana reservations involved in Wandering Medicine. Webster found that Indians on those reservations traveled two to three times farther than whites to get to a county courthouse. Meanwhile, depending on the reservation, Indians were two to three times more likely not to have a vehicle for the trip. They were also less likely to have money to fill the gas tank: In Blaine County, which overlaps Fort Belknap, Webster found that the Native poverty rate was 2.5 times that of whites; in Rosebud County, which overlaps the Northern Cheyenne reservation, Natives were four times more likely than whites to live below the poverty line.

Fear also keeps Natives away from white towns and their courthouses, establishing an apartheid condition in American Indian communities. “They are today the poorest, most isolated and in some quarters, the most racially castigated population in the country,” writes sociologist Garth Massey, a University of Wyoming emeritus professor who submitted an expert report to the court on behalf of the plaintiffs.

Full political participation has been a long time coming for American Indians. Nineteenth-century policy veered between killing and “civilizing” Indians, writes Daniel McCool, political science professor at the University of Utah and author of Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and the Right to Vote. State laws offered enfranchisement to Indians who could show they’d done such things as renouncing tribal ties, and owning “white” clothes and houses.

If Wandering Medicine succeeds in giving Natives in Montana equal access to the polls, the impact could resonate far beyond the state borders. As of late May, a New York Times analysis suggested that Republicans had about a 40 percent chance of gaining the six seats they need to take control of the Senate. Three seats seen as potential Republican pick-ups are in Montana, Alaska and South Dakota, which have large Native minorities (8, 19 and 10 percent, respectively) that lean, sometimes heavily, Democratic. In other words, the Native vote just might determine control of the Senate.

Better voting access would encourage elected officials to help launch studies and to respond to tribes’ myriad other problems: high unemployment, extreme poverty, substance abuse, a chronically underfunded healthcare system, and crumbling schools, public buildings and homes.

Wandering Medicine is not the only recent lawsuit that takes aim at the numerous obstacles Native people face in securing equal rights. In April, Voting Rights Project director emeritus McDonald and Montana ACLU attorneys negotiated a redistricting settlement that provides Fort Peck tribal members with equal representation on a local school board. That suit, Jackson v. Board of Trustees of Wolf Point School District, is one of many since the 1960s that have restructured districts that marginalized the Indian vote. The Navajo Nation is currently advancing just such a suit, which claims that election districts in Utah’s San Juan County, which the reservation overlaps, are designed so Navajo votes have less weight than those of non-Navajos.

In Alaska Native settlements, lack of language assistance is a major voting obstacle, according to Las Vegas attorney James Tucker. In Toyukuk v. Treadwell, Tucker argues that Yup’ik speakers in parts of southwestern Alaska haven’t received language assistance mandated by the Voting Rights Act for those who aren’t English-proficient. As a result, some Alaska Native voters struggle with lists of candidates, text of referenda, and instructions for signing, folding and other manipulations of the ballot that must be done correctly for the vote to count, says Tucker. He calls voting under such circumstances “a Hail Mary play.”

In South Dakota, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation voters settled Brooks v. Gant last year, giving them absentee-voting satellite offices through 2018. Four Directions helped frame the lawsuit, based on its experience setting up offices in past elections. The nonprofit then secured a commitment from South Dakota to use Help America Vote Act funds for offices on more reservations.

These struggles and victories will bring Native people into our nation’s political life. There will be more Native elected officials and a greater involvement for Native Americans in their traditional lands.

They have fought for this country, and now they want to be part of taking better care of it.