Udall and 12 other Democrats introduce bill to battle suppression of the Americ

Udall and 12 other Democrats introduce bill to battle suppression of the American Indian vote



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Sheriff Jim Daggett of South Dakota, 2014, at Pine Ridge early voting polling place.
It didn't turn out too well for him though. Voters ousted him and renamed Shannon County as Oglala Lakota County.



Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico and a dozen other Democratic senators have introduced the Native American Voting Rights Act of 2018 designed to give American Indians the same access to the ballot box as non-Indian voters. This is something Indians are already supposed to have. But there continue to be forces that prefer to do what they can to suppress the Indian vote in areas where those votes can make a difference. The provisions of the act include establishing a Native American Voting Rights Task Force, restoring the “preclearance” of any changes in voting laws that affect Indians (something that was removed when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 five years ago), providing equal access to voter registration and polls, giving equal status to tribal IDs for voting purposes, mandating that tribes can ask federal observers to monitor elections, and requiring adequate language assistance.

Until the Snyder Act was signed in 1924, most American Indians didn’t have the right to vote. A few thousand had gotten that right as a consequence of serving in the military during World War I. Before that some Indians who had proved to authorities that they had given up their Indianness and tribal connections also were enfranchised. The Snyder Act—formally the Indian Citizenship Act—was designed to extend voting rights to the whole Native population, the last population group in the country to see that right legally guaranteed.

But in the 92 years since the act passed, state and local authorities in jurisdictions with large numbers of Indians have engaged in all kinds of manipulations to keep them from voting. Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming all found means to block or dilute the Indian vote.
For instance, having ignored the 1924 act, South Dakota did not repeal until 1951 its 1903 law requiring a culture test for Indians to prove they had abandoned their identity as Indians, their culture, their language, and their homeland in order to vote or hold office. As late as 1975, authorities prohibited Indians from voting in elections in Todd, Shannon, and Washabaugh counties, whose residents were overwhelmingly Indian. The state also prohibited residents of these counties from holding county office until as recently as 1980. And South Dakota continued suppressing Indian voting rights decades later.


Although it's not widely known, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 included American Indians in its mandate. Because of the act, Indians on the Ute reservations of southwestern Colorado finally obtained guaranteed voting rights for local elections in 1970. While the suppression of the Native vote has usually been more subtle than the Jim Crow laws that kept almost all African Americans in several states from casting votes until the 1960s, it has definitely had a negative impact on Indians. Native activists or their allies have repeatedly taken officials to court over this suppression and usually won, as in this 2013 case.

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/10/4/1801522/-Udall-and-12-other-Democrats-introduce-bill-to-battle-suppression-of-the-American-Indian-vote?detail=emailLL