Tribes see mail ballot collection as a lifeline
NIXON, Nev. — Many older people living on the expansive Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation in northern Nevada relied on the tribe’s senior services van to get to the grocery store or the doctor before the coronavirus pandemic ended that option.
Now, tribal officials worry how elders and others who don’t have cars or can’t travel on their own will get to the post office to return their ballots before Election Day.
“The distance has been a barrier for our people to vote,” tribal council member Janet Davis said outside the small, wood-shingle post office in the town of Nixon, not far from the turquoise lake that gives the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe its name. “We have elders that might not be able to move around much, those that might be afraid of the pandemic, people who are disabled and people that don’t have transportation.”
To make voting easier, a new Nevada law allows residents to fill out their ballots and let someone else return them on their behalf — a neighbor, tribal official or political volunteer. To Davis and other tribal officials, it’s not unlike the way people on far-flung reservations help each other run errands.
Tribes see ballot collection as a critical way to boost historically low Native American turnout. They are targeting bans on the practice in several states, including Arizona and Montana, as more states move to mail-in voting during the pandemic. It’s become a flashpoint in a rancorous election year, with President Donald Trump claiming without evidence that it will lead to fraud.
Detractors argue that so-called ballot harvesting allows political groups to deploy volunteers to collect ballots on a mass scale and sway elections. They worry about the potential for tampering similar to what happened two years ago in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, where a Republican political operative is accused of manipulating incomplete ballots.
Tribes say the negative impact of limiting ballot assistance in Indian Country is often absent from the debate. Native Americans have a lower voter turnout rate than other racial or ethnic groups. They face less-reliable mail service on remote tribal lands and often must travel long distances to reach a polling place or a post office to return a mail-in ballot. And it’s only gotten tougher with services scaled down because of the virus.
Trump’s campaign sued Nevada after the Democratic-controlled Legislature passed a law to mail ballots to all active voters and lift limits on who can collect ballots for other people. It makes it a felony to not return a ballot after being entrusted to do so. The president alleged the law will compromise election integrity, but a federal judge dismissed the case, saying the campaign didn’t show how it would be harmed.
“It’s just the case that in the regular course of their lives, Native Americans pick up and drop off mail for each other,” said Jacqueline De León, an attorney for the Native American Rights Fund. “It’s a way people cut down the cost and burden of getting their mail in the rural places they live.”
The Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation spans more than 742 square miles north of Reno. Residents live mainly in three towns — Wadsworth, Nixon and Sutcliffe — that are up to 30 miles apart.
On a reservation that’s been closed to outsiders to prevent the spread of the virus, only in Sutcliffe does the Postal Service deliver mail to neighborhoods. Homes in Wadsworth and Nixon rely on P.O. boxes at their post office, which is open only from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Residents say the mail is either infrequent or unreliable.
That’s the case on many tribal lands, including the Navajo Nation, where voters recently lost a lawsuit in Arizona seeking an extra 10 days past Election Day to count mail-in ballots because of post office delays.