Battling the Hydra: the disparate impact of voter ID requirements in North Dakota

Abstract

Minority voters have experienced a renewed effort to curtail their access to the ballot box in recent years. Although a host of research has examined the impact of election changes on Black and Latino voters, scholars have dedicated much less attention to the rights of Native Americans, even as they face challenges to voting in states where they comprise a significant portion of the population. Many of these states are likewise increasingly important to national elections. Such laws may impact Native Americans when they intersect with the political geography of living on a reservation, and voting rights advocates have challenged them in places like MT, NV and ND. This paper empirically evaluates how such laws might uniquely impact Native American voters. We draw on North Dakota's voter identification law as a case study, but our analysis has wider implications, since residency is the primary means by which election administration uniquely impacts this group. Drawing on two rich survey datasets collected in 2015 and 2017, we offer descriptive evidence of the barriers individuals may encounter while trying to obtain an ID under North Dakota's law, and find that Native Americans are statistically less likely to have access to an ID than are whites. This gap is largely due to the requirement that an ID has a physical address and attendant difficulties in obtaining such an ID, given the remote nature of reservations. We bring needed attention to the impact of carefully crafted electoral rules on this often-overlooked group.

Introduction to the special issue on indigenous politics

“…Other articles raise similar issues about legacies of settler colonialism, its tremendous impact on Indigenous politics (Barreto et al ., 2022; Beauvais, 2022; Foxworth and Boulding, 2022), Indigenous political participation and political knowledge (Koch, 2022) and efforts of Indigenous groups to exert power within existing political structures (Carlson, 2022). For Foxworth and Boulding (2022), survivance stands front and center as competing stereotypical images of Native people as either savage or spiritual, reinforce settler-colonial images and beliefs about Indigenous populations.…”

“…Other articles investigate how Indigenous peoples creatively adapt, resist, and negotiate current encounters with the non-Indigenous states and publics. Barreto, Sanchez and Walker (2022) illustrate the legacy of past encounters on current Indigenous politics through their examination of a settler state government's efforts to limit the influence of Indigenous peoples as voters. By linking residency, as defined by the state of North Dakota, to a valid piece of identification required for voting, historical wrongs of removal and confinement are used in the present to limit the rights of Native people to exercise political power.…”

“…These findings are in line with Vizenor's (2008) model of survivance as Indigenous people in the U.S. are opting into military service and active in the political process. This presence and actuality in the electoral process then generates state pushback, like efforts to disenfranchise Native voters in ND (Barreto et al , 2022).…”

“…Their preexisting status as governments and exercise of some form of political power over their territories and people confers different standing than that of other groups. As several scholars note in this issue, Indigenous groups navigate settler-colonial governments in Japan (Komai, 2022), Canada (Beauvais, 2022), and in the United States at both the federal level (Carlson, 2022) and in individual states, including ND (Barreto et al ., 2022), and HI (Phan and Lee, 2022), with a status unlike that of racial or ethnic minorities. Some researchers use comparison to groups that are also non-majoritarian but not Indigenous, to highlight the political relationships of out groups (Carlson, 2022; Foxworth and Boulding 2022; Koch, 2022; Barreto et al , 2022).…”

“…These findings are in line with Vizenor's (2008) model of survivance as Indigenous people in the U.S. are opting into military service and active in the political process. This presence and actuality in the electoral process then generates state pushback, like efforts to disenfranchise Native voters in ND (Barreto et al, 2022). Komai (2022) and Carlson (2022) examine how tribal governments and Native organizations, like individual Natives, negotiate and renegotiate political power and space.…”