North Dakota’s Voter ID Law, Seen as Retaliatory and Privileged
Lawmakers discussed Dakota Access Pipeline protests in approving voter statute burdensome to Native Americans
This story was commissioned by The Los Angeles Times and was published on Nov. 4, 2018. It’s been adapted here to reflect headlines, wording, grammatical and style-guide edits preferred among Indigenous Peoples, including the final image and caption layout. Segments featured in bold represent content that was either omitted by the editor or additions made by the journalist. Author’s notes can be found here.
It was less than a decade ago when, across North Dakota, street signs with names such as Buffalo Avenue began sprouting in reservation communities like Fort Yates — home to tribal citizens like Terry Yellow Fat.
Yellow Fat, a great-grandfather who has raised his family on trust lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, had never before had reason to identify his government-issued house by colonized standards — by numeric addresses. When his mail arrives, it’s not delivered to his door, but to a post office box a mile down the road, a circumstance typical of reservation life.
With Election Day nearing, though, the focus on Yellow Fat’s address has become problematic. Under a law the Supreme Court allowed to take effect last month, voters here cannot vote without a residential address. A post office box, once good enough to secure a ballot in this state, just won’t cut it anymore.
Election officials and tribal governments are scrambling to respond to a voter ID law that critics say has been untested, unplanned and involves last-minute work-arounds such as so-called 911 coordinators tasked to quickly assign an address based simply on a description of where would-be voters live.
But tribal citizens like Yellow Fat said that fix isuneven at best.
The Friday before Election Day, the former school superintendent was frustrated. In an attempt to cast an absentee ballot, Yellow Fat said the Sioux County election auditor needed his tribal enrollment number along with his proof of address, a bogus requirement in complying with the state’s voter ID law. This turned him right off.
“That’s a number assigned to us by the Bureau of Indian Affairs — our pedigree,” he said about the federal recognition tribes and its citizens have historically been burdened by.
“That’s not how I want the state to start identifying me by.”
Election officials and political leaders have failed to understand the everyday realities of Native Americans, where people don’t need addresses to find neighbors on reservations and where long-held grievances over broken treaties, stolen lands and harmful assimilation policies have spurred a culture of distrust against state and federal governments.
On Thursday, a North Dakota federal judge denied the Spirit Lake Nation and six other individuals, including Yellow Fat, a bid to halt the voter ID law. The judge said that while the suit raised serious questions about the statute, it would only create greater confusion to grant an injunction this close to the election.
A sense of discord was also central to the lawsuit which argued that many Native Americans living on reservation lands do not have addresses or were assigned invalid addresses. Meanwhile, some of the same addresses have been assigned multiple times to different voters.
“This problem threatens hundreds if not thousands more on Election Day,” the suit said.
The litigation argued that the voter ID law, introduced by Republican legislators claiming to prevent voter fraud, is actually aimed at disenfranchising Native American voters. It is among a handful of voter suppression cases — from a rigid voter ID law in Georgia to a tough-to-reach polling station in Kansas — unfolding in the U.S. in which marginalized communities claim their votes are at risk.
North Dakota Secretary of State Alvin Jaeger denies that the law, as implemented, was intended to deprive any person from voting. Even before the voter ID law was upheld by federal courts, Jaeger sent a preemptive memo to tribal leaders directing voters to the 911 coordinators in each of North Dakota’s 53 counties to obtain an assigned residential street address to comply with the law.
However, it has been everything but easy for some would-be voters.
For Yellow Fat, the process has been, in a word, confusing. The day he tried to apply for an absentee ballot, he was issued not one, but two different addresses. The first one came from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The second from the state. Neither, however, reflects where he actually lives on the corner of Buffalo Ave.
“What have they done to us,” said Yellow Fat, a Vietnam veteran. “It makes me not even want to vote.”
The voter measure was first introduced following Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp’s 2012 victory in a tight race determined by roughly 3,000 votes. Many of those ballots for Heitkamp were cast by Native Americans. When the 2013 voter ID law took effect, critics saw it as an attempt to suppress the Native American vote and filed suit, which ultimately was rejected in the courts. The North Dakota state legislature was debating the issue again in early 2017 when President Trump was preparing to sign an executive order to resume construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the controversial energy project that tribal citizens and their allies had protested.
Testimony recorded in committee minutes discussing the measure at the time indicate that questions were raised by legislators about suspected voter fraud that may have occurred in the 2016 general election from those living “on the other side of the bridge” — a reference to the months-long road blockade enforced by a militarized police force guarding the pipeline construction.
What hangs in the balance, politically, are several critical issues. Control of the Senate is one factor; Heitkamp trails her opponent, Republican Kevin Cramer, in a race that could tip the razor-thin GOP majority to the Democrats. For Indian Country, key legislation is also at stake. Heitkamp, a member of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, is one of Washington’s lead proponents for tribes, including leadership behind her criminal justice bill to help quell the chronic rate of violence on Indigenous women.
An underdog again, Heitkamp knows the Native American vote will be vital for her win. But voter suppression of these ballots isn’t the only hurdle standing in the way. For many tribal citizens statewide, there’s a sense of shared betrayal by the senator who supported the over-policing of protesters, or water protectors, who took a stand against the DAPL.
“It was like being stabbed in the heart,” said Phyllis Young a former Standing Rock tribal councilwoman and long-time supporter of Heitkamp’s.
The image that lives most in Young’s mind is the day Heitkamp fed a holiday meal to National Guard troops who had been deployed to block roads to the pipeline drill pad and who were staged at the same military base used by the U.S. Army to kill off hundreds of Lakota and Dakota in the Whitestone Hill Massacre more than a century earlier.
“I don’t think my daughter can ever forgive her, but I know I have to,” said Young.
“We have no choice but to go forward.”
In the final weeks ahead of the election, the state’s five federally-recognized tribal nations have been utilizing the 911 coordinator system to print their own ID cards with addresses for tribal citizens at no cost while the state has offered free IDs to eligible voters provided by the state’s Department of Transportation.
But verifying the addresses — so that every vote counts — may be difficult.
Calls made to county auditors supervising midterm elections in reservation-based precincts say they have been trained to verify addresses at the polls using a system different from the 911 list that Native American voters were encouraged to use by the secretary of state.
Auditors in three of the counties — Benson, Rollet and Sioux counties — said they will use state databases, or printed poll books, that list past voters whose residential street addresses match the North Dakota Department of Transportation. Addresses that do not appear in the file will be added as write-ins, according to auditors. If required, they said verification could also include cross-referencing with the state’s 911 coordination system.
Ballots requiring further address verification will be placed in a “set aside” pile and it will be up to voters to validate their ballot by presenting supplementary documentation — such as utility bills, bank statements or employment pay stubs. But the problem, once again for tribal citizens, is that many of these documents won’t reveal addresses since they use postal boxes. There’s also the sobering fact that a disproportionate number of Native Americans living on reservations in the state lack homes, bank accounts and jobs. It’s difficult to see voting here, then, as anything more than a privilege rather than a constitutional right.
One auditor's interpretation of the law spelled out a worst-case scenario if the addresses don’t match up after Election Day.
“If the address is incorrect it goes to the Attorney General’s office where it will be prosecuted for fraud,” said Barbara Hettich, the same Sioux County auditor that asked for Yellow Fat’s tribal enrollment number.
(The Secretary of State’s office did not comment on what would constitute voter fraud in the verification process.)
“It’s a silent war,” Young said of the process.
Today, oil flows in the DAPL near the campsite where so many had gathered on a patch of historic Treaty land that the state has all but erased of signs from the Indigenous solidarity that grew there. But tensions from that battle linger. Some say they’ve even flared up over the controversial voter ID law. To be sure, the federal judge who denied Native Americans relief from the statute this week was integral in sending protesters to prison for their anti-pipeline activism.
But like the stand at Standing Rock, the movement for something greater is felt.
Outside a get-out-the-vote command center down the street from where Yellow Fat lives, parked is a bright yellow school bus tacked with a rendering of one of the tribe’s most revered resisters, Sitting Bull — a symbol to the kind of duty that tribal citizens say they now feel to have their voices heard.
“We have been challenged,” said Young.
“And yes, we are going to vote like never before.”
