Native American leaders tell Senate to act to protect their voting rights
Congress could help restore the Voting Rights Act to protect voters on Indian County.
KIRA LERNER JUL 18, 2018, 11:16 AM
WASHINGTON, D.C. — During a Senate roundtable Tuesday on “Voting Rights, Access, and Barriers in Indian Country,” North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) turned to the tribal leaders and voting advocates and asked a question they were all thinking.
“Why should we have to sue every year in North Dakota to get voting rights for Native people?” she asked.
Throughout the morning, witnesses explained to the Senate Indian Affairs and Rules committees how barriers to the ballot persist in Indian Country, almost 100 years after Native Americans were granted the right to vote and more than 50 years after Congress signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to protect the civil rights of the country’s marginalized populations.
As ThinkProgress recently reported, voters in Indian Country have faced renewed barriers to the ballot since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the VRA in 2013. In states with large Native American populations, elected officials have cut voting hours and opportunities, refused to add voting locations on reservations, eliminated language assistance services, and fought to keep Native voters in majority-white gerrymandered districts where they’d never get political representation.
https://thinkprogress.org/native-american-leaders-tell-senate-to-act-to-protect-voting-rights-f87495fcda13/
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