Federal Judge Lets North Dakota Republicans Disenfranchise Native Americans

A federal judge has rejected a North Dakota tribe’s motion to block the state’s strict new voter ID law requiring voters to list their current residential address, a thinly veiled attempt to disenfranchise the state’s Native Americans, many of whom live on rural reservations with no residential street addresses. The order comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the Spirit Lake Tribe, which sued North Dakota Secretary of State Alvin Jaeger in a last-minute bid to block the voter ID measure. That lawsuit cites several cases in which Native Americans who had obtained the necessary documentation still found themselves unable to vote.

“Voters whose state-issued or tribal IDs list what they know to be their current residential address have had their absentee ballots rejected as having ‘invalid’ addresses. This problem threatens hundreds if not thousands more on Election Day,” states the lawsuit, which was filed on Oct. 30.

The lawsuit continues to point out the ways in which the state’s government has failed its Native American population.

“Moreover, many Native Americans simply have no residential address because the government has not assigned them one. Others have been assigned an address, but it was never communicated to them,” the Spirit Lake Tribe’s lawsuit points out. “Many such roads in North Dakota have been assigned multiple, conflicting names, and many homes have been assigned multiple, conflicting numbers. Some homes have been identified as occupying two cities, with different zip codes, depending upon the occupant to whom the government spoke in assigning an address.”