Racist Vote Suppression: Not Just For the Confederacy Anymore

Despite Brian Kemp’s best efforts, I think North Dakota has earned this year’s Bull Connor Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Vote Suppression:

On Oct. 14, Dion Jackson mailed in an absentee ballot application for the upcoming election. Jackson, an enrolled member of the Spirit Lake Tribe who lives on the Spirit Lake Reservation in North Dakota, is an American who is qualified to vote. But on Oct. 22, he received a letter explaining that his application had been rejected. The street address that Jackson had listed—the one that appears on his state-issued ID—was invalid, the letter explained. If he did not take further action, he would not be allowed to vote in the midterm election.

There is no street sign identifying Jackson’s street. There is no number on his house. A state database identifies his street as “Unknown2.” Jackson would not be permitted to vote because, according to the state, he has no real address.

Jackson’s struggle is currently playing out across North Dakota. A stringent new law that requires all voters to prove their residential street address has placed an immense burden on Native Americans in the state. Many live on rural reservations in houses with no residential address, rendering them incapable of casting a ballot. Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block a lower court decision upholding this rule, over a pointed dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now Native American voters are back in court, asking a federal judge to grant them relief. This time, they aren’t just arguing that the law makes voting more onerous. They’ve demonstrated that the law may make it impossible for them to vote at all.

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Since the 8th Circuit lifted the block on the new law, tribal governments have scrambled to hand out hundreds of new ID cards, usually for free. But thousands of Native Americans still don’t have identification with a residential street address deemed valid by the state. And as the examples above illustrate, hundreds more simply cannot get them at all. To make matters worse, North Dakota’s Republican Secretary of State Alvin Jaeger has indicated that he will strictly enforce the residential address requirement and refused to say whether he’ll accept newly printed tribal IDs.

In light of these roadblocks, Tuesday’s lawsuit urges the federal district court to block the residential address rule in counties that encompass Indian reservations—or, at a minimum, for the voters who brought this suit. As an alternative, the lawsuit proposes letting voters identify their residences on a precinct map to verify their eligibility. These solutions make a great deal of sense. If the “courthouse doors” truly “remain open,” after all, Native Americans’ ability to vote should not hinge on the competence of random officials like “Kurt.”

It is worth marveling at how far afield the North Dakota government has drifted from the original rationale behind its new law. When they introduced this legislation, Republicans claimed they were seeking to curb voter fraud. (There is no evidence that voter fraud is a problem in North Dakota, or anywhere else in the U.S.) Yet no one seriously claims that Native Americans are exploiting their lack of a residential address to cast illegal ballots. This legal battle has laid bare the law’s true intent—to disenfranchise minority voters who might give Heitkamp another term. Now Native Americans must plead with the courts to stop their state from voiding their vote. This is not what a democracy looks like.

Of course, any Supreme Court remotely worthy of the name would have already stepped in to stop this blatant nullification of the Constitution and Congress, but this one is all too happy not merely to ignore the nullifcations of state officials but to engage in such nullifcations itself.