Impact of Redistricting and Voter Suppression on Indian Country and Native American Voters
As the mid-term elections approach, experts – Jacqueline De Leon, Senior Attorney, Native American Rights Fund; Nicole Donaghy, Executive Director, North Dakota Native Vote; Derrick Beetso, Director, Indian Gaming and Tribal Self-Governance programs, Arizona State School of Law; Nicole Borromeo, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Alaska Federation of Natives; and Moderator: Mark Trahant, Editor Emeritus, Indian Country Today – explored how efforts by some state legislatures to reduce the influence of voters of color through gerrymandered maps and voter restriction laws have impacted Native American voters at a joint briefing by Ethnic Media Services, ICT, formerly Indian Country Today, and FNX TV, Oct. 13.
Mark Trahant, editor emeritus for ICT, moderated the event. “Our focus today is on the power of the Native American vote nationally, and in key states, in the wake of redistricting across dozens of voter restriction laws at the state level,” said Trahant to open the floor to discussions.
Jacqueline de Leon of the Native American Rights Fund is a staff attorney and a member of the Isleta Pueblo.
“I’m proud to lead NARF’s voting rights (vote.narf.org) work. As unprecedented attacks on our democracy have continued to grow more and more bold, NARF has responded. We have built a coalition of native national organizations and national voting rights organizations, regional and local tribal organizations, tribes, and academics with the goal of solving the problem of how and why Native American turnout has been historically so low.
“According to a report the absurd structural barriers that face Native American communities – from unreasonably far away election day polling places that can be over a hundred miles round trip, to access lack of registration opportunities and lack of residential mail delivery and addressing on homes that make registration and receiving a ballot difficult or impossible – these structural deficiencies are compounded by poverty, poor road conditions, and lack of access to reliable transportation that can handle the often winter weather in November.
“These are not just structural barriers that occur out of nowhere, they’re a reflection of the purposeful exclusion of Native Americans in the American politic and the continued and ongoing hostility towards Native Americans voting and getting the representation and resources that they’re entitled to as American citizens as well as tribal citizens.
“We know that fear is animating increased voting barriers against Native Americans across the country. We’ve seen a dramatic rise in laws that are aimed at making it difficult or impossible for Native Americans to vote and the reason is because the Native American vote has the power to swing a host of elections this coming year.
“Native Americans have swung elections in Alaska whether that be for Senator Murkowski or recently in the election of Alaska native congresswoman Mary Peltola. Native Americans swung elections for Senator Tester in Montana, and Senator Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota.
“President Biden’s victory in Arizona was credited to Native Americans, and the populations of voting age-eligible Native Americans can swing elections in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Nevada.
“Native American votes are being excluded from the table because there is power in these votes,” said De Leon.
“NARF has responded with a host of litigation, recently winning a nearly 200-page order in the state court of Montana where we challenged a ban on ballot collection and a ban on Election Day registration.
“We partnered with the ACLU and Harvard’s election law clinic to challenge these laws and in that case the legislature was well aware that banning ballot collection and Election Day registration in Montana would disproportionately impact Native Americans,” said De Leon.
Derrick Beetso, director of Indian Gaming and Tribal Self-Governance programs, Arizona State School of Law and a citizen of Navajo Nation, was born in Tuba City, Arizona.
“As a result of the redistricting maps which were redrawn recently, there’s a real concern about whether O’Halloran will be able to continue in this role on behalf of Navajo people. This has been the representative that has done a lot for our community he’s had a strong voice on The Hill,” said Beesto.
“Historically, there’s been a radical undercount of the Native American population and unfortunately that affects redistricting because when you’re drawing the maps they use the census numbers and we know that that the populations are actually bigger than what are recorded, but that can impact redistricting and unfortunately, impact the allocation of resources.
“Census is another place where the structural barriers really stack up against Native American communities,” said Beesto.
Nicole Donaghy, executive director of North Dakota Native Vote, an enrolled citizen of the Sovereign Nation of Standing Rock in North Dakota. “Since 2013, our communities have faced several of 10 attempts to stifle the Native American vote through changes to North Dakota’s voter ID laws. In 2017 the state legislature passed a bill which wrote into law the requirement that all voters must have a physical location on their ID cards, and reservations don’t have a traditional bidding system where addresses are located on the house and although it does not come to our homes on the reservation, so the voter ID law proved to be super difficult and caused a lot of challenges in our communities.
“Our biggest challenge is making contact with voters in remote rural communities,” said Donaghy.
“In 2021, the redistricting process happened. It does begin as a bill in our state and the state legislature oversees redrawing these districting lines, and essentially driving their own lines and keeping them in office or pushing other legislators out.
“We’ve gave so much input on that price to make it more equitable to have more hearings near the reservations, which did not happen. The closest reservation is Standing Rock which is 60 miles south of Bismarck, where all of the meetings happened.
“This year, we have a record number of Native Americans on the ballot, over 10 candidates across eight legislative districts.
“We are utilizing a digital platform on our ‘pledge to vote’ campaign. Back in 2018, we’ve seen blatant attacks on our voters. We had a lot of people coming into the polls at the time and they had incidents of racism, intimidation tactics, where the poll workers were threatening to close the polls that day, so we want to make sure that we have a friendly face at the polls, that we have native people in these positions that are watching and are observant, and are there to answer questions, should problems arise,” said Donahgy.
Nicole Borromeo with Alaska Federation of Natives talked about Alaska’s recent redistricting process. “It has been the fairest, most transparent process we have ever had as a state,” said Borromeo, who is a proud shareholder of both, Doyon Limited, and MTNT Limited, her Village Corporation. Borromeo also served the chairman there and is enrolled to the McGrath native Village Council, which is her tribe.
“Our redistricting process is led by citizens who are appointed in an order specified in our constitution. The governor has the charge of making the first two appointments. Those appointments are almost always done on a partisan basis. After his or her appointments are done, it then triggers these Senate President to make his or her appointment, following that the Speaker of the House makes the next appointment, and the final fifth appointment is reserved for the Chief Justice of the Alaska Supreme Court. This cycle had two Alaska natives serving on the redistricting board.
“In July 2021, a whole year after my appointment to the redistricting board, we finally got down to starting to be trained on the software and the broader legal principles of what goes into redistricting generally at the federal level and then what our specific requirements are under our state constitution.
“In August of 2021, we started the mapping process.
“Under our constitution, we need to adopt a series of maps within 30 days of receiving the Census Data. Because we were in a pandemic, we didn’t get the Census data for about five months later than we expected it to.
“When the Census Data arrived, we finally had the numbers for what the population looked like and to everyone’s surprise we did not have a mass exodus in our traditionally voting rights districts that we thought we would have. Those populations held very constant, and we didn’t have any VRA concerns this time around, so we just needed to start mapping based on the Census data in our districts.
“In Alaska, we have 40 house districts and then we pair those 40 house districts together to come up with 20 Senate districts. I was one of the two board members, there were five of us who drafted what we call a full 40. I drafted all 40 districts. I mapped them, I mapped several different versions of them, I was mapping anywhere from four to ten hours a day for about a month straight, leading up to the adoption of our maps, and then we went on a public hearing campaign, a very aggressive one.
“We took the maps that we adopted at the board level plus about four other maps that we adopted from third parties, and we brought them all over the state. I was one of the very vocal members on the board at that time who said we absolutely need to get these out into the field. People need to have the opportunities to see these maps and to interact with them and we need to hear from the communities about what we were going to do.
“COVID was still a concern, the Delta variant was raging, we were tested regularly sanitizing masking, the whole nine yards. There was some resistance at the board level to get out into rural Alaska and to bring the maps. My response was, ‘if we can be holding hearings in Anchorage, we can be bringing these maps to the rural areas into the entire state, so all Alaskans have the opportunity to see the maps,’” said Borromeo.
“We crisscrossed the state. We had 26 public hearings in every region of the state except for the Aleutians. We tried to get there but they were having hurricane force winds,” said Borromeo.
