On the battlefield of the Senate, Amerindian voting rights activists defend themselves against identity restrictions

Native American activists in North Dakota have launched a bold plan to counter a Supreme Court ruling that threatens the re-election of Senator Heidi Heitkamp (DN.D.) – and who could decide the fate of the Senate. .

The High Court decided on Tuesday and Tuesday to leave in place a state law requiring residents to provide a piece of identification stating their residential address instead of an IP address. box number to vote. Republican lawmakers who pushed for the measure say the rule is designed to fight voter fraud.

According to tribal representatives and Democrats, it appears that this text aims to make it more difficult for thousands of Native Americans to vote, especially those living on reserves without conventional street names. The law specifically prohibits the use of PO boxes as another form of address, making many tribal identity cards invalid.

Indian activists responded by planning to create local addresses for those who need them on election day.

Tribal leaders will be standing in front of the polls on November 6 with a laptop, a rural addressing software and a shared voter name database. North Dakota is the only state that does not require voter registration, which means that eligible voters can usually go to the polls and vote, provided they have a coin. appropriate identity.

O.J. Semans, chief executive of Four Directions, a national Indian advocacy group, said the strategy was "legally watertight" and necessary to counter the court's "devastating" decision.

"Even if it does not change the end result, you have to fight back," Semans said. "We must fight."

In one of the country's least populous states – and where Heitkamp, ​​one of the most threatened Democratic MPs in the Senate, won a victory of less than 3,000 votes in 2012 – the Supreme Court's decision could prove to be decisive.

It was widely accepted that the Amerindians won the last Heitkamp victory, triggering a six-year legal attrition war between the GOP-led Bismarck headquarters and tribal leaders and defense of the right to vote. Census of the Census Bureau shows that 46,000 Native Americans live in North Dakota, including 20,000 in tribal reserves. According to documents filed by the courts, at least 5,000 people on bookings do not have a conventional address.

North Dakota has become a top priority for Republicans seeking to retain their slim majority in the Senate. In this week's television interview, Trump, who won the state by 36 percentage points in 2016, touted polls that representative Kevin Cramer (right) was leading Heitkamp double-digit. Republicans voted Heitkamp against Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh's confirmation of the Supreme Court as central to their efforts as the campaign enters the home stretch.

Amerindian advocacy groups described this week's Supreme Court ruling, in which Kavanaugh did not participate, as the latest ploy to reduce the already low participation rate of tribes.

"This is a partisan and intentional effort for Aboriginal voters," said Matt Campbell, a lawyer with the Native American Rights Fund, who represented a group of veterans in the process. He quoted official figures indicating that in 2012 there had been only nine cases of potential electoral fraud out of 325,862 votes cast. "Electoral fraud is not a problem," he said.

Al Jaeger, Secretary of State for North Dakota, did not respond to a request for comment. However, in a response to "Four Directions" obtained by the Washington Post, Jaeger warns that the activists' plan could cause confusion among voters. He cited the example of the Chippewa Tribe's Turtle Mountain Band, which, he said, was already bound by an agreement delegating the power to erect road signs and signs. Assign street addresses to Rolette County.

In a letter sent in 2017 to the defunct Commission on Electoral Integrity, President Trump, Jaeger also set out his views on the need for stricter requirements in voter identification.

"While some people argue that there is no evidence of widespread election fraud, others argue exactly the opposite," Jaeger wrote. "In any case, in the current forms of election administration, it is not possible to determine whether or not there is widespread electoral fraud, because it is difficult to determine one or the other. situations where the evidence is not required by electors when they register or vote. . "

In a dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court case, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned that the North Dakota Identity Act presented a "serious" risk of "widespread voter confusion". His view was that different identification rules were in place during the first state election. this spring, which means that some voters could go to the polls with an insufficient ID card or just stay home in November.

"Reasonable voters may very well presume that identity cards allowing them to vote in the primary election would remain valid at the general election," wrote Ginsburg.

Cramer did not respond publicly to the Supreme Court's decision and his campaign did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Post.

Julia Krieger, communications director for the Heitkamp campaign, declined to comment on the plans of the Amerindian activists, but described the Voter Identity Act as a partisan measure to reduce voter turnout in Heitkamp .

"The adoption by the Republican majority legislature of North Dakota almost immediately after Heidi's victory in 2012 is no secret: North Dakota's hyper-partisan laws of electoral identity target students and Aboriginal communities because they prefer Heidi to the US Senate, "said Krieger.

While North Dakota has voted Republican in 19 of the last 20 presidential elections, the state has long been represented by two Democratic senators, Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad. Heitkamp ran in 2012 after his mentor, Conrad, encouraged him; it has remained popular partly by distancing itself from the national democrats, although the state has turned to the right in recent years.

The first flash point of the legal battle around voter identity laws came after Heitkamp's election in 2013, when the state legislature argued that the system in place at the time facilitated electoral fraud. . Lawmakers have banned alternatives for people without an identity card, including affidavits signed under penalty of perjury or tribal representatives attesting that an elector was a local resident. They then removed the college and military cards from the list of acceptable documents and passed another law requiring the identity of a person to contain a current residence address.

Jim Silrum, Deputy Secretary of State for North Dakota, a supporter of efforts to strengthen voter rules, said at the time that the measure had been developed after "concerned citizens" and representatives of State had raised concerns about the possibility of electoral fraud.

Activists say that a succession of laws put in place since 2012 have deprived their rights of thousands of tribal voters, especially those who lived on reserves or in wilderness areas. At the mid-point in 2014 in Rolette County, home to the Turtle Mountain Tribal Reserve, turnout dropped from 45% to 33%, while neighboring non-tribal areas recorded no decrease. comparable.

"We have been fighting the suppression of our political rights and our voice for decades," said Wizipan Little Elk, who led the Barack Obama Indians' outreach efforts in the 2008 presidential election. is only one more example. "