Covid-19 has led more states to implement mail-in voting. But the method adds yet another barrier to ballot access for Native voters in a hugely important election year.
By Ella Nilsen
Vox
June 22, 2020
From the article:
When election season rolls around every two years, the approximately 2,400 eligible voters living in the Fort Belknap Indian Community in Montana’s central plains start getting a lot of phone calls. Gerald “Bear Shirt” Stiffarm is often the voice on the other end of the line.
Fort Belknap sits on roughly 1,000 square miles; its vast grasslands, where buffalo graze, and its dramatic mountain buttes make up about 25 percent of Blaine County. The main road is a two-lane highway that snakes through the rolling hills. Two Native American tribes, the Gros Ventre and the Assiniboine, call this land home.
Stiffarm, 71, occupies two roles on the reservation: He’s the station manager at Native public broadcasting station KGVA in the small town of Harlem, and one of the founding members of the Snake Butte Voter Coalition, a nonpartisan group that has been mobilizing Native voters on the reservation to cast their ballots since the early 1990s.
It’s a Herculean task. “We call these people nonstop,” Stiffarm said in a recent phone interview. “We’ve heard every conceivable excuse there is for people not wanting to vote. They say, ‘Nobody cares about me.’ Well, we care about you.”
When Covid-19 hit, Montana gave its counties the option to switch to mail-in ballots for the June 2 primary — and all of them did. Instead of in-person voting on Election Day, voters could drop their ballot in the mail or vote early in person at each county’s election office. But some satellite voting offices on Indian reservations like Fort Belknap also closed, leaving just one satellite office open in Blaine County for the primary, said county clerk and recorder Tammy Williams.
The satellite offices were the result of a 2012 lawsuit brought by three Native tribes to expand voting access on the reservations. In the last few election cycles, advocates say the offices helped increase Native American turnout across the state. During the 2018 midterm elections, Blaine County’s voter turnout was 71 percent — on par with the county record of 72 percent in the 2016 presidential election, according to the local paper.
The Covid-related closures were a setback that required some Fort Belknap voters to travel nearly 80 miles into town to collect and drop off their ballots, then 80 miles back.
While Montana as a state saw record primary turnout on June 2 — more than 389,000 ballots cast, compared with 293,000 in the 2016 primary, according to Montana Public Radio — the three counties with the lowest turnout were all home to Native American tribes including the Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Fort Peck, and Blackfeet. In Blaine County, primary turnout was just 46 percent, compared with 72 to 76 percent in some majority-white counties, according to the Montana Secretary of State’s office. (Williams said she doesn’t currently know whether one or both voting offices will reopen for the November general election, when turnout will surely be higher.)
As the novel coronavirus threatens the safety of in-person voting in 2020, voting by mail is on the rise. But this year’s primary turnout in Blaine County illustrates how it poses a predicament for Native American voters across the US: A voting method that’s supposed to be easier and more convenient adds yet another impediment to Native ballot access.
“You might as well say we are no longer citizens and can no longer vote,” said OJ Semans, a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and co-founder of the Native voting rights group Four Directions.
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