The gubernatorial race between incumbent Republican Gov. Kristi Noem and her Democratic challenger Jamie Smith is hair thin. And since counties such as Oglala Lakota (home of the Pine Ridge reservation) and Todd (home to the Rosebud reservation) skew heavily Democratic, of course, Republicans are doing what they can to keep Native voters in the state away from the polls.
According to reporting by South Dakota News Watch, South Dakota has nearly 78,000 Indigenous residents, making up about 8.8% of the population. Nationally, the Native American population is about 2.0%. Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota, has the highest single-county population of American Indians at a whopping 93.9%. Activists are pushing to get new voters registered as quickly as possible.
Chase Iron Eyes of the Lakota People’s Law Project says, “If we start voting, we’re going to be respected… If we don’t vote, we don’t matter.”
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According to the National Congress of American Indians, 34% of Native Americans and Alaska Natives are not registered to vote, compared with 26.5% of non-Hispanic whites—equalling about 1.2 million potentially eligible voters. Also, the turnout of registered Native American and Alaska Native voters is between 1 to 10 percentage points below the rate of other racial and ethnic groups.
The reasons for low voter turnout runs the gambit. From cultural and language barriers to lack of access to polling sites to intentional efforts to make the process of registering and voting as difficult as possible, such as excluding P.O. boxes as valid home addresses—a real problem for those in very rural areas without regular mail service.
In May 2022, a federal judge ruled in favor of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, stating that South Dakota had committed violations of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), also known as the “Motor-Voter” law—a law demanding that driver's license offices and public assistance agencies provide voter registration services to their clients.
Native American Rights Fund (NARF) reported data for the suit that found that South Dakota residents registering to vote through public assistance went down by 57% from 2004 to 2007, from 7,000 applications down to 2,981, South Dakota News Watch reports.
According to the Lakota Times, District Judge Lawrence Piersol stated that South Dakota had not followed the law of the NVRA’s authority “to establish procedures that will increase the number of eligible citizens who register to vote.” Adding that South Dakota Secretary of State Steve Barnett “contributed to these failings through inadequate training and oversight.”
A staff attorney from NARF, Samantha Kelty, said at the time the ruling was a “huge win for all of South Dakota, this decision is one victory amongst a long history of denying and suppressing Natives’ right to vote in South Dakota and beyond. This is a first step in eliminating years of South Dakota’s willful neglect in complying with the NVRA. We hope that this increases the number of eligible citizens who are able to register to vote in South Dakota. It is crucial that we continue to fight to eliminate all obstacles to the Native vote.”
Since the May ruling, the state has changed the wording on driver’s license applications so that now the form allows someone to opt out of the voter registration process, instead of opting in.
Barnett has said he has warned legislators about lawsuits the state will face when they attempt to change laws and violate NVRA.
“Our goal is to provide reasonable access and make it hard to cheat, but it’s tough to please everybody. It would be nice to take the politics out of it,” Barnett, who lost the 2022 GOP nomination to Monae Johnson.
Johnson ran on an “election integrity” campaign, and has said she opposes online voting and online registration and would like to eliminate early voting, mail-in voting, and voting machines. Her opponent, Democrat Tom Cool, has voiced concern that she will work to make voting more difficult.
“Again, we haven’t been able to get a response from the Republican candidate about her position on whether she rejects these ideas," Cool said. "I strongly reject these ideas.”
Voting rights activists say the opportunity for people to cast their ballots is not a partisan issue. It’s a democratic issue.
“We don’t care how Native Americans vote, we just want them to be able to vote, and we work across the country to make that happen,” Kelty says. “Native Americans are not a monolith. Every tribe is different, and every individual is different.”
South Dakota has been transparent in many ways in its effort to keep its Indigenous people from the polls.
South Dakota News Watch reports that while many U.S. states used their COVID-19 relief funds to increase awareness of the 2020 census, South Dakota did not.
Kelty says, “South Dakota could very easily be a leader in championing Native American voting rights across the board, and that’s not happening.”
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