VOTING RIGHTS
Voter ID Law Hurts Native American Access to the Ballot Box
New Study Shows the Disparate Impact of Voter ID Requirements in North Dakota
In her dissenting opinion in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg invoked challenges to voting rights issued by state governments after the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments, particularly in the South, writing: “Early attempts to cope with this vile infection resembled battling the Hydra. Whenever one form of voting discrimination was identified and prohibited, others sprang up in its place.”
She admonished the Court for striking down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which provided federal protection for access to the ballot box for minority voters, newly imperiled once again.
Our new paper, recently published in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics with Drs. Matt Barreto and Gabe Sanchez, takes its cue from Ginsburg’s prescient analysis. We examine the disparate impact of North Dakota’s voter identification law on its largest minority population: Native Americans.
Native Americans make up about 5% of the states’ population overall. They are large enough to impact elections, contributing to former Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp’s 2013 victory. Indeed, the state legislature adopted a restrictive version of its law shortly after her electoral success, requiring that one’s identification include a physical address in order to vote. The address requirement specifically impacts Native Americans in the state, many of whom live on reservations so remote they do not receive postal delivery service. Instead, folks have a PO Box and that mailing address is listed on identification issued by Tribal governments.
Thus, voting rights advocates, lead by the Native American Rights Fund, challenged the law in court due to its disparate impact on Native voters. As a consequence of this suit, the state amended its law in 2016, but retained the physical address requirement. Advocates thus challenged the law a second time, again successfully.
Voting rights advocates won, in part, because evidence that the law disparately impacts Native voters is decisive. In our paper, we examine access to identification that would have been acceptable under both iterations of North Dakota’s law among Native and non-Native voters in the state. We conducted surveys that employ culturally competent sampling methods to ensure we have a robust and representative sample of Native Americans, who are a hard to reach group of people. Surveys can help us understand access to a valid piece of ID because we can ask people about the specifics of the ID, like whether it’s unexpired and contains an address, and we can ensure that they haven’t lost it and actually have it in their possession.
Across two samples, Native-American voters in the state are significantly less likely to possess a valid ID than are non-Native voters. About 82% of Native Americans had access to an appropriate ID, relative to 89% of non-Native Americans.
For context, this disparity is pretty close to what my co-authors and I observe between white and Black and Latinx voters across several states in this related paper, published in 2018. These disparities persist after controlling for other factors likely to impact access to an ID, like income and education.
We also asked individuals who said they did not have an ID that would be valid under the law whether they have access to documents required to obtain an ID, like an Social Security number and/or a birth certificate. The disparities in access between Native and non-Native eligible voters in North Dakota are evident among this group as well — for example, in 2015 two-thirds (66%) of non-Native voters who did not have an ID said they access to ALL the documents required to get one, relative to under half (47%) of Native voters.
We also asked folks about other kinds of barriers to getting an ID, like being able to get to the DMV during operating hours, having access to a car and the like. Again, Native Americans eligible to vote were disproportionately burdened. Almost 70% of Native Americans without an ID faced at least on barrier to obtaining an ID, relative to 60% of non-Native eligible voters for whom the same was true.
Native voters and the barriers they face to asserting their political voice are often overlooked by researchers, but we better start paying attention — states increasingly important to national elections boast large Native populations, including Oklahoma, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado.
State voting laws are not one-size-fits-all — when designed to curtail access to the ballot box, they are crafted to the specific minority populations in their states.
For Native voters, address requirements call back to Jim Crow era residency and citizenship requirements, which specifically disenfranchised them due to residing on reservations. Any change to election administration that conditions access to the ballot box on residency in ways that uniquely intersect with tribal affiliation in particular should be expected to disproportionately impact Native American voters. This was true in North Dakota.
It therefore behooves those concerned with questions of normative democracy to heed the call for continuing research on the specific racial and local nature of election administration, which operates, “within the subtext of racial power to reproduce the inequalities that demand the attention of political scientists in the first place.”
