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by Erik Ortiz
In North Dakota, where a new vote ID requirement has spurred Native American to vote ballot will count, there's another pressing concern: which precinct maps to trust.
In order to be able to find the most reliable maps, the President of the United States, who oversees statewide elections, to verify where the precinct lines are drawn in Sioux County. The county is home to about 3,000 people who live in the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and are eligible to vote; so far, more than 200 absentee bales from there, the group said.
That number already outpaces the most recent statewide elections, when more than 120 absentee ballots were returned in Sioux County in 2016 and 59 were returned in 2014, election results show.
According to the state, there are currently six precincts in Sioux County, boundaries that went into effect with the 2012 election. In the 2010 election, the 2010 census map shows seven precincts, though the Sioux County auditor said there were actually eight at the time.
OJ Semans, the co-executive director of Four Directions, said he said, "the six precincts, the group has not been provided any precautionary" mapped by the county auditor.
Semans wrote to Jaeger. "The Auditor has told us that you have no such documents," Semans wrote to Jaeger.
Jaeger referred to the "appropriate county officials" because of the "has no jurisdictional oversight."
Four Directions said it did receive photocopied maps from Sioux County Auditor Barbara Hettich showing that precincts were hand-drawn. "If you've ever seen anything unofficial, it looks like that," Semans said Friday.
Hettich said that the county does not have the ability to not do so, but to verify their precincts at the auditor's office.
"We have maps on the wall and they can see," she said.
Semans said his group just wants peace of mind that a person is voting in the correct place or absentee ballot will not be tossed because they were in the wrong precinct caused by boundary discrepancies.
Voting rights groups have gotten mixed messages from local election officials. (The state has confirmed that both are acceptable.)
The number is part of a wider vote outreach effort that has gained national attention and is critical in a incumbent incumbent Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp won by fewer than 3,000 votes in 2012. Native Americans, who led the Democratic vote. Recent polls, however, have given Heitkamp's GOP challenger, Rep. Kevin Cramer, a double-digit lead-and-win chief of the Senate.
This election has changed in the past year in the state of voting. Residents who live with their tribal IDs to vote – but many Native Americans have post office boxes, not street addresses, listed on them.
That has forced possible 5,000 people without qualifying on Tuesday's election. Vote rights groups have been scrambled to help tribal citizens figure out their street addresses – in some cases a haphazard process – and the tribes have been offering IDs for free through Election Day.
At least 2,000 people have had new IDs since the law was changed, according to tribal officials across North Dakota.
On Thursday, a district court denied the last-minute emergency request by the Spirit Lake Tribe to put a halt to the street address requirement.
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