ID law may spur more Native Americans to vote

FORTYATES,N.D. — Nobody in the squat yellow house serving as the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s get-out-the-vote headquarters knew its address.

It was on Red Tail Hawk Avenue. They knew that much. But the number was anyone’s guess. Phyllis Young, a longtime tribal activist leading the voter-outreach effort, said it had fallen off the side of the house at some point. Her own home has a number only because she added one with permanent marker.

This is normal on Native American reservations. Buildings lack numbers. Streets lack signs. Even when a house has an address in official records, residents do not necessarily know what it is.

“We know our communities based off our communities,” said Danielle Ta’Sheena Finn, a Standing Rock spokeswoman and tribal judge. “We know, ‘Hey, that’s so-and-so’s house. You go two houses down and that’s the correct place you need to be.’ ”

Yet under a law the Supreme Court allowed to take effect this month, North Dakotans cannot vote without a residential address. Post office boxes, which many Native Americans rely on, are not enough anymore.

The Republican-controlled state Legislature began debating this requirement just a few months after Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat, won a Senate seat in 2012 with strong support from Native Americans. That race was decided by fewer than 3,000 votes. Heitkamp is now seeking re-election in one of the nation’s most aggressively contested elections, and she is trailing her Republican opponent, Rep. Kevin Cramer, in the polls. And once again, she is looking to Native Americans for a strong vote: there are at least 30,000 of them in North Dakota.

Supporters of the address requirement say it is needed to prevent voter fraud and has nothing to do with Heitkamp. Native Americans, noting that state officials have not confirmed any pattern of fraud, see it as an attempt at voter suppression.

But in these final days before the election, their tribal governments are working feverishly to provide the necessary identification, and some Native Americans believe their anger could actually fuel higher turnout.

“I’m past the point of being upset over it,” said Lonna Jackson-Street, secretary and treasurer of the Spirit Lake Tribe. “I’m more excited about the outcome, because I think we’re going to bring in numbers that we’ve never seen before.”

If that happens, it will be because of a considerable expenditure of time and resources on the part of the tribes and advocacy groups supporting them.

Tribes have extended their office hours and worked around the clock to find efficient ways to assign addresses and issue identification. They are providing hundreds of free IDs when they would normally charge at least $5 to $10 apiece. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians printed so many IDs that the machine overheated and started melting the cards.

“What people out there don’t understand is how much it costs a tribe to make sure that each and every individual tribal member has that right to vote,” said O J Semans, co-executive director of Four Directions, a Native American voting rights group working with tribal leaders.

State officials say it is easy for anyone without a residential address to get one. In a letter to tribal leaders last month — just after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit let the requirement take effect, in a decision later affirmed by the Supreme Court — Secretary of State Al Jaeger’s office wrote that voters could contact their county’s 911 coordinator, describe the location of their home and have an address assigned “in an hour or less.”

In practice, it is not always so simple.

Voters’ experiences have varied greatly based on which county they live in. In Rolette County, where the Turtle Mountain Reservation is, they have been able to get addresses from the county and IDs from the tribe without much red tape. But at Standing Rock, in Sioux County, the 911 coordinator is the sheriff, Frank Landeis. That is a deterrent to people who are afraid to interact with law enforcement, much less tell the sheriff where they live.