NEW A vastly improved search engine helps you find the latest on companies, business leaders, and news more easily.<doc-sep>The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe slammed the Supreme Court’s decision allowing North Dakota to enforce a voter ID law. The law requires voters to present identification that includes a current residential street address if they want to vote in this year’s midterm elections. In regards to the #SCOTUS decision on North Dakota voter ID requirements, official statement: pic.twitter.com/9oC4Cw1euG — Standing Rock Sioux (@StandingRockST) October 11, 2018 “Native Americans can live on the reservation without an address. They’ve lived in accordance with the law and treaties, but now all of a sudden they can’t vote. There is no good reason that a P.O. box is not sufficient to vote,” Standing Rock Chairman Mike Faith said in a press release. ADVERTISEMENT “Why is it getting harder and harder for Native Americans to vote? This law clearly discriminates against Native Americans in North Dakota. Our voices should be heard and they should be heard fairly at the polls just like all other Americans,” he added. A district court temporarily blocked the North Dakota secretary of state from enforcing the new requirements during the primary elections. But the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked that court order last month, allowing the law to be put in place ahead of the general election. The Supreme Court upheld the appeals court’s decision Tuesday. “The risk of voter confusion appears severe here because the injunction against requiring residential-address identification was in force during the primary election and because the Secretary of State’s website announced for months the ID requirements as they existed under that injunction,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent. “Reasonable voters may well assume that the IDs allowing them to vote in the primary election would remain valid in the general election,” she added. North Dakota is hosting one of the country’s most widely watched Senate races, in which Sen. Heidi Heitkamp Mary (Heidi) Kathryn HeitkampEffective and profitable climate solutions are within the nation's farms and forests Bill Maher blasts removal of journalist at Teen Vogue Centrist Democrats pose major problem for progressives MORE (D-N.D.) is facing off against Rep. Kevin Cramer Kevin John CramerOvernight Defense: Air Force nominee threads needle on F-35's future | Senate panel advances historic Army secretary pick Senate panel advances first female Army secretary nominee Bipartisan group of senators introduces surface transportation bill MORE (R-N.D.) to win a second term in the Senate.<doc-sep>FORT YATES, N.D. -- Courtney Yellow Fat, a tribal council member for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, has lived on a reservation for most of his life -- a community which historically hasn't used street names or addresses and instead relies on post office boxes. So, a few years back when he made the 90-minute trek to the state capital of Bismarck to the department of motor vehicles for an updated license, he felt he had no choice but to make up one on the spot. "Sitting Bull Street, I think," he said of the street address he gave for his state-issued driver's license. His tribal issued ID is correct because he has since gotten an actual street address listed for 911 purposes and he plans to add that address to his driver's license. Still, it's a complicated matter for thousands of Native American voters in North Dakota who, because the Supreme Court last week allowed the state to implement its strict voter ID law, now find themselves scurrying to make sure they have identification with street address so their votes will count. According to studies commissioned by Native American rights groups who sued North Dakota over the new law, roughly 35 percent of that population doesn't have an acceptable ID with a residential address. Nevertheless, Yellow Fat and other tribal leaders are optimistic that the ruling will galvanize Native American voter turnout. "I believe and I hope it's going to have the opposite effect of suppression because the people here are so used to fighting uphill battles against the U.S. government," he said. The question of whether Native American votes will be counted is an especially relevant one in the upcoming midterms because, in less than three weeks, Yellow Fat and Native Americans across North Dakota will be among the nation’s most important groups in an election likely to help determine Senate control. North Dakota’s voters are the most powerful in the country, according to FiveThirtyEight’s voter power index. A vote in North Dakota has more influence on which party will control the Senate majority than a vote in any other state, a point not lost on Yellow Fat. “After the election of Sen. Heitkamp is when a lot of this came up through the legislature. And to us it’s clearly suppression of our votes,” Yellow Fat said. The ability to have those Native American voters' ballots count is especially important for Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp's re-election bid. She won her first election in 2012 by fewer than 3,000 votes thanks in part to Native American voters who cast their ballots under less restrictive voting laws. The court decision makes her already tough re-election bid against popular Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer even harder than it already has been. Native Americans comprise 2 percent of the national population, but make up a larger share of North Dakota’s population at just over 5 percent. The state is also home to five reservations, which often vote in large numbers for Democrats and serve as a chunk of the state Democratic Party’s base. Secretary of State Al Jaeger, the defendant in the voter ID lawsuit, told ABC News voter suppression is not the intent of his office or the voter ID law. “I can look you straight in the eye and I will tell you that nothing has ever happened in this office to target anybody. That's not what I was elected to do,” Jaeger said. “I took an oath of office to follow the laws of the state of North Dakota and I try my best every day to do that.” Jaeger said his office is entirely focused on making voting accessible to anyone who wants to do so. “I don't have time to try to figure out how to disenfranchise anybody in the state of North Dakota because all of our efforts to make sure that anyone who wants to vote will be able to vote.” Heitkamp countered Jaeger’s view in an interview with ABC News after Thursday night’s Senate debate. She said the law by its nature blatantly disenfranchises Native Americans by requiring a residential street address. “Why would we ever disenfranchise a Native American veteran who only has a P.O. box that everybody knows when they walk into the polling booth, they know exactly who that person is, they know that they're a North Dakota resident. That's why we don't have registration in North Dakota because we don't have this problem and anyone who says this isn't about disenfranchising Native Americans is not being honest,” the senator said. Jaeger said that the PO box requirement was meant for the state to verify that voters who live in a given precinct get a ballot specific to where they live and that votes are not supposed to be cast by people who do not actually live in the precinct. “It becomes very difficult if somebody just comes in with a PO box because we have no way of knowing which ballot that they should receive,” Jaeger said, giving examples of how election issues vary in different towns across the state. “Voting is tied to a residential address, and so there's a lot of different ballots.” Although a lower court sided with the Native Americans before the state’s June primary, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court have both ruled in recent weeks that the state can move ahead with its law for its stated purpose, namely combatting voter fraud. Voter fraud, however, has been virtually nonexistent in North Dakota, with the Secretary of State’s office saying that the number of fraudulent voter cases found have been in the single digits in both the 2012 and 2016 elections. Jaeger, however, said that the numbers do not mean they can rule out the existence of voter fraud, citing voters in 2016 who voted without IDs and were unable to be matched by his office, in the weeks after the election, back to a home address they’d written down when they voted. “Their ballot was counted and we can't find them anymore. From my position that's a concern. Because that means the integrity of the election may have been compromised,” Jaeger said. The first effort at a voter ID law in North Dakota passed in 2013, within a few months of Heitkamp’s victory. A court win by tribal members prevented the law from taking effect for the 2016 election. Last year, the Republican legislature worked with the secretary of state’s office on a new bill. The bill allowed voters without an ID showing a residential address to vote, but would only count their vote if they could prove their address to election officials within six days of the election. Tribal activists submitted to the state legislature statistics detailing Native Americans’ difficulty in getting an acceptable ID. The bill passed with overwhelming support from the Republican majority. Court documents indicate the state did not consult with tribal governments about the impact of the bill on Native Americans, even after tribal members won their 2016 case. Activists have accused Republican legislators and state election officials of erecting barriers to voting for the state’s mostly Democratic Native American population. North Dakota’s two majority-Native American counties both supported Heidi Heitkamp with nearly 80 percent of the vote when she first ran in 2012. In a statement this week, the leaders of the four largest tribes in North Dakota opposed the law, calling it “suppressive” and accused the state of attempting to disenfranchise Native American voters. “We believe the requirement of a physical, residential property with a street address was intended to disenfranchise Native American voters. To combat the disenfranchisement of our members, we intend to ensure that our members that lack residential street addresses can obtain them so that they may exercise their right to vote,” the statement read. “We encourage all tribal people to come out to vote on November 6th even if you do not have a qualifying ID,” the statement added. “We will not be silenced by the blatant attempts to rob our people of our voice.” Heitkamp and Cramer both addressed the voter ID ruling in their debate Thursday night.<doc-sep>
This image was removed due to legal reasons. The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a decision by North Dakota courts to require voters to have a residential street address in order to be eligible to vote in the upcoming midterm elections, a decision which will disproportionately harm Native American citizens living on tribal land. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was sworn in to the court on Saturday, did not participate in the decision. Justices Ginsberg and Kagan dissented, but in votes like this, the full vote tally isn’t required to be disclosed — we just know that a majority of the eight justices involved voted to apply the law. The decision stems from a 2017 law signed by North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, which first set the street address requirement. According to the Native American Rights Fund, the organization supporting the plaintiffs in the case that went to the Supreme Court, this disenfranchises thousands of Native residents of the state. As NARF notes, many Natives living on reservations don’t have residential street addresses, because the U.S. postal service doesn’t deliver to residential addresses in their communities. Instead, they use PO boxes to get their mail, a normal thing that millions of Americans do to receive mail if it’s not convenient for them at the place that they live. But unfortunately, under the new law, that immediately disqualifies them from voting. And it’s even more complicated — under the law, voters have to have a residential address on an accepted form of ID as well. This ID can be a government drivers’ license or ID card, or a tribal ID — but either way, it has to have a residential street address on it. So people who have a legal tribal ID but use a PO box instead of a RSA are will get turned away at the polls. Per the NARF site, “If a tribal ID has an address, it is typically the PO Box address, which does not satisfy North Dakota’s restrictive voter ID law.” Great. Adding to the monumental clusterfuck that is voting in North Dakota right now, the law didn’t apply during the primaries. The legal process behind it is a bit complicated, but essentially, the courts had allowed a preliminary injunction that prevented the state from enforcing the new law during the primaries, and making it so people with a PO box could vote. After the primaries, in September, the district court issued a stay on that injunction (which would mean the law would be enforced during the general election in November). The NARF and plaintiffs then filed an emergency request to vacate that stay which would mean that the same people who were able to vote in the primaries could vote in the general. The Supreme Court, however, shot down that request to vacate the stay today. What this means is that some voters who voted in the primaries will turn up to the polls in November and get turned away. From Ginsberg’s dissent today: But the confusion arising from vacating the stay would at most lead to voters securing an additional form of ID. That inconvenience pales in comparison to the confusion caused by the Eighth Circuit’s order, which may lead to voters finding out at the polling place that they cannot vote because their formerly valid ID is now insufficient.﻿ Buzzfeed’s legal editor Chris Geidner has a good thread walking through the different steps with open links to a lot of the legal documents filed, if you want to dive deep. There’s also a pretty good history (albeit a biased on toward the state) in the opposition filing for the most recent Supreme Court decision. All together, this could add up to some serious consequences for Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp in the midterms. Heitkamp’s seat is already in jeopardy because she’s a Democrat running in a deep red state, but reports show that she’s already struggling to secure the Native vote, and disenfranchising thousands more Natives doesn’t bode well for the Democrats. Update, 11:30 PM 10/09/2018: Something I probably should have added that a commenter reminded me of: The law actually affects more non-Native voters than it does Natives, but percentage wise is far more likely to affect Natives.