Last Tuesday, the Supreme Court allowed a lower court ruling to stand, allowing North Dakota to require voters to provide identification that shows a residential address rather than a post office box number. Many Native American advocacy groups have argued that this decision violates tribal sovereignty and systematically disenfranchises voters. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp’s (D-N.D.) reelection may be at stake.
The reason: Many Native Americans living on rural reservations do not have traditional street addresses, and receive mail at P.O. boxes rather than at home.
But that’s not the only issue that keeps Native Americans from voting. Native Americans on reservations have long voted at very low rates, facing barriers to voting that include long travel distances to the polls, high poverty rates, and low high school graduation rates. When native voters need to travel to reservation border towns to cast ballots, the well-documentedand long-standing mistrust between Native American communities and non-native populations likely discourages voting in those areas…
So would having a voting booth on reservations bring out more voters? To find out, we looked at 2016 voter turnout across these four reservations. Our analysis, after controlling for other factors, suggests that, yes, it did. In the two reservations that had the on-site early voting option, turnout went up roughly 11 to 24 percent over that at reservations where citizens still had to travel to border towns.
What do our findings mean for Nevada’s Native Americans?
This research suggests that adding administrative barriers — like requiring street addresses for people who don’t have street addresses — will likely depress voter turnout on reservations still more.
Nor would it help to allow Native Americans to vote by mail. Our survey evidence found that very few Native Americans vote by mail, both because they do not trust the process and because they do not have regular access to mail. By a wide margin, we found that native voters trust their vote is more likely to be counted when it is cast in person. With limited access to mail and without the ability to use post office boxes to vote, reservation turnout probably won’t go up if it’s possible to vote by mail.