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In North Dakota, Native Americans Try to Turn an ID Law to Their Advantage

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Inside A North Dakota Tribe’s Fight to Vote

On the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, Native American voters are scrambling to comply with a restrictive voter ID law in time to cast ballots for a crucial Senate election.

“I’ve lived here my whole life, so I know where everybody lives on a reservation. We don’t even have physical addresses. If somebody told me to go to BIA Number 8, I wouldn’t even know where that is. But tell me who lives on BIA Number 8 and I can get there.” Here on this North Dakota reservation, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians don’t use residential addresses. “Do you have your ID?” But if they want to vote in the midterm election, they need to have one printed on their ID card. “They’re giving free IDs right now.” “Yeah.” “And you should get the word out to everybody around here.” That’s because of a recent Supreme Court ruling that lets a controversial North Dakota voter ID law stand. The fight against the North Dakota law started after Richard Brakebill and other members of the Turtle Mountain tribe were turned away from the polls in 2014. “They said that because my ID didn’t have my address, and I didn’t really have a North Dakota ID or anything — that was really a letdown to me, you know? I felt bad, you know, when they refused me.” Now a seasonal laborer, Brakebill is also a Navy veteran, who says he’s voted steadily since he was 18. “That’s what kind of upset me too, you know, you go serve our country and then to be treated like that, you know?” With the Native American Rights Fund and others representing them, the Turtle Mountain members tried to block the law. They argued that it was discriminatory, in part because reservations don’t use physical addresses. They won their case. A federal judge ruled the law unconstitutional in 2016. But their fight wasn’t over. The next year, the North Dakota governor signed a new law with essentially the same rules. Turtle Mountain tried to block the law again. And that case made its way up to the Supreme Court of the United States. “I didn’t hear a lot of conversation about the Supreme Court decision when it first came down. I think it was when people started realizing, a day or two after, that it really meant suppression of our votes.” Jamie Azure has been meeting with other tribal leaders and advocates to figure out how to get people the documentation they need. “We came up with a tribal letterhead in — when we met at Spirit Lake. I mean, they have everything on there. They have post office box, physical address, enrollment number. They have a photo ID.” Proponents of the law say it’s necessary to stop fraud, especially since North Dakota doesn’t require voters to register in advance. But according to the Native American Rights Fund, native voters are more than twice as likely as others to lack a qualifying ID. “Come on. Bring it into your heart and bring it over your head.” With the midterms fast approaching, the tribes are not alone in feeling the pressure. The Democratic Party is also rallying to get the word out in native communities here. [chanting] [drumming] The reservations in North Dakota are patches of blue in a sea of red. This is a very conservative state. Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp barely won in 2012. Her margin of victory was only about 3,000 votes. “You need to vote. And you need to vote in record numbers. Let’s send a message that the highest turnout of any group in North Dakota is Native Americans because they won’t mess with you again.” [applause] Now, Heitkamp is trailing her Republican opponent in the polls. If Democrats are to have a chance of flipping the Senate, Heidi Heitkamp needs to win. And her winning depends on getting native North Dakotans out to vote. They’re depending on her too. “The most important issues on the federal level for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa are federal programs and federal grants. It’s scary knowing that we don’t have control over our own future right now.” The Democratic Party has field organizers working on four reservations across North Dakota. Anna Giron focuses on Turtle Mountain, where she’s from. “Thank you.” “The new tribal ID, right?” No one knows exactly how many people here lack the proper ID. “And I’ll give you a ride to go and get your —” “O.K. —” “ID.” Younger residents are more likely to have a state-issued driver’s license, which always has an address on it. The problem is bigger for the elderly. “Miss Wally, are you up for a little bit of company? The voter name — Eugene — Oh, you did it already? You don’t have any type of North Dakota ID that has a physical address on it?” “No.” “Joe, do you have any of your ID on you? All right. Now see, this is an old tribal ID that we have. This has no address on it.” New tribal IDs usually cost $10. That may not sound like a lot, but this reservation has a 59 percent unemployment rate. In response to the voter ID law, all the tribes in North Dakota are now issuing IDs for free. “One, two, three.” “That’s nice.” “Yep, it’s nice.” The county generates the addresses. “I look like a criminal here.” In Turtle Mountain, there will also be a machine at each polling place on Nov. 6, ready to print new cards for those who still need them. “Back in the 1800s, we fought the same battles. The only difference between the 1800s and now is, 1800s, we have guns. Now we have a pen.” “Yep.” “And the pen is what we need to use —” “So now, we are in 2018. And we are reengaged back into the fight. We’re not going to let anybody stop us from voting. This is the power that we have. And we have a very unique power for this specific election. And I just want people to understand the importance of that.”

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On the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, Native American voters are scrambling to comply with a restrictive voter ID law in time to cast ballots for a crucial Senate election.

FORT YATES, 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 don’t necessarily know what it is.

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Judith LeBlanc, left, of the Native Organizers Alliance, and OJ Semans of Four Directions arrived at the Standing Rock tribe’s get-out-the-vote headquarters in Fort Yates. Ms. LeBlanc and Mr. Semans are working to get proper IDs for Native Americans so they can vote.Credit...Kristina Barker for The New York Times

“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.’”

[Here’s a look at where North Dakota's voter ID controversy stands.]

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, aren’t 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. Ms. Heitkamp is now seeking re-election in one of the nation’s most aggressively contested elections, and she is trailing her Republican opponent, Representative 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.

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Winona Fox, left, and Lonna Jackson-Street, the Spirit Lake tribe’s secretary and treasurer, looked at a list of residents who have come to get the addresses they need to vote.Credit...Kristina Barker for The New York Times

Supporters of the address requirement say it is needed to prevent voter fraud and has nothing to do with Ms. 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.”

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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 OJ Semans, co-executive director of Four Directions, a Native American voting rights group working with tribal leaders. “The tribes have invested thousands of dollars, whether it’s equipment, man-hours, meetings. This has not come cheap.”

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 United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth 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 isn’t 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’s a deterrent to people who are afraid to interact with law enforcement, much less tell the sheriff where they live, and Sheriff Landeis is not easy to reach.

When Ms. Finn called him on Oct. 12, three days after the Supreme Court ruling, he was out. On Oct. 15, he said he was transporting prisoners and could not assign addresses that day. He was also unavailable when The New York Times called on Friday.

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Senator Heidi Heitkamp at her rally at the Prairie Knights Casino and Resort in Standing Rock. Ms. Heitkamp is trailing her Republican opponent in the polls.Credit...Kristina Barker for The New York Times

And in an episode recounted independently by Ms. Finn, Mr. Semans and Ms. Young, a tribal elder, Terry Yellow Fat, got through to Sheriff Landeis only to be assigned the address of a bar near his house. Mr. Semans worried that, in addition to playing into stereotypes about Native Americans and alcohol, this could expose Mr. Yellow Fat to fraud charges if he voted under an address he knew was incorrect.

So, with help from Four Directions and others, some tribes are creating addresses themselves — and preparing to do so until the polls close.

Geographic information experts at Claremont Graduate University in California overlaid voting precinct maps on satellite images of the reservations and assigned each precinct one address. Voters can now point to their house on the map and be assigned the precinct address plus a unique identifier: -001, -002, and so on. Tribal officials will be stationed at every reservation polling site on Election Day with a form letter on tribal letterhead, ready to assign an address and issue identification on the spot.

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Ms. LeBlanc gathered supplies for the get-out-the-vote headquarters, where staff and volunteers will be stationed until Election Day.Credit...Kristina Barker for The New York Times

Four Directions informed Secretary Jaeger of this plan in early October and asked him to endorse it. In his response, which his office provided to The Times, Mr. Jaeger declined, saying that whether tribes had the authority to create their own addresses was a question beyond his office’s purview. He added, however, that he could not “dictate the style or format of the identification used by a tribal government if it contains the required voter information,” suggesting that a letter with a handwritten address should be as valid as an ID card.

The pace of working with potential voters has been relentless for the tribes. Ms. Jackson-Street said Spirit Lake had identified and was trying to reach 211 members without residential addresses, in addition to printing ID cards for members who had addresses but no document showing them. Robin Smith, the tribe’s enrollment director, said last Tuesday that she had been too inundated with ID requests to budge from her chair all morning.

Merle White Tail, 50, had no street address, so Ms. Smith assigned one. Grant Cavanaugh, 32, had an address on file but didn’t know what it was, so she looked it up. Darien Spotted Bird, 21, had an ID card that misspelled his address, so she printed a new one.

Then there are more subtle problems. For instance, while Sioux County does not offer early voting, it does — like all North Dakota counties — allow early, no-excuse-needed absentee voting, which is functionally almost identical. But Mr. Semans said that when one woman went to the county auditor’s office and asked to vote early, the auditor, Barbara Hettich, simply told her there was no early voting and didn’t mention the absentee option. (Ms. Hettich did not respond to a request for comment.)

Later, when Ms. Young filled out an absentee ballot, Ms. Hettich told her she had to use blue ink or the ballot would not be counted. But literature on the secretary of state’s website says ballots must be filled out in black ink. Mr. Semans ping-ponged back and forth between Standing Rock and Bismarck, trying to get a guarantee that ballots would not be thrown out because of ink color. On Friday, Lee Ann Oliver in the secretary of state’s office told The Times that both blue and black were acceptable.

The scene at the get-out-the-vote headquarters in Fort Yates last Monday showed how hurriedly the whole effort there had been put together. The room was mostly empty. There was a small table, a couple of armchairs, some old swivel chairs, all delivered the day before. The team was trying to create a voter database from a list of people who bought propane last winter. The phones were not hooked up yet.

But soon, canvassers would be fanning out across the reservation, knocking on doors. This year’s Miss Standing Rock, Wanbli Waunsila Wi Eagle, 18, filmed a public service announcement urging her peers to vote. Ms. Finn asked the principals of the reservation’s three high schools to excuse age-eligible seniors from class to get IDs and vote. On Election Day, eight vans will shuttle people to and from the polls.

“The right to vote can be taken for granted until someone tries to take it away from you, and then it can be the reason you do vote,” said Jodi Gillette, a Standing Rock member who worked for the Interior Department under President Barack Obama. “Essentially, someone is saying, ‘Sit down and shut up.’ And we’re tired of it.”

Follow Maggie Astor on Twitter: @MaggieAstor.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: In North Dakota, Native Americans Try to Turn ID Law Into a Gain. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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