North Dakota's Racist Voter ID Law Is Already Backfiring- article from The Daily Beast

https://www.thedailybeast.com/north-dakotas-racist-voter-id-law-is-already-backfiring

DEMOCRACY AT WORK!’
North Dakota’s Racist Voter ID Law Is Already Backfiring
Jay Michaelson
11.01.18


In response, the state’s Republican-dominated legislature passed a new law that seems specifically intended to make it harder for Native Americans to vote. In addition to a strict ID requirement, the law requires all voters to provide proof of a residential street address—something many Natives who live on reservations simply do not have.

Large numbers of Native Americans use post office boxes to receive mail and live on unmarked and unsigned streets. Many others live with various family members. Still others have no idea that their streets even have names.
In total, about 5,000 Native Americans lack the required voter ID—larger than the electoral margin in 2016.

Needless to say, there were no documented instances of voter fraud involving people without street addresses.


“They didn’t need an address when they took our children and rounded them up into boarding schools,” Chase Iron Eyes, a Native American lawyer who lost a congressional bid in 2016, told NBC News. “And they didn’t need an address when they conscripted us to fight in the military and make a worthy and honorable sacrifice. But now they need our address when we want to exercise our right to vote.”

SNIP
Native Americans have a plan to defeat it at the polls.

First, a coalition of groups led by the Lakota People’s Law Project and the national Native American group Four Directions have been furiously helping people get proper IDs free of charge. According to the Associated Press, they’ve helped more than 2,000 people get them.

The New York Times reported that one band of Chippewa printed so many IDs that the machine overheated and started melting the cards.

“We’re at our best in crisis,” Phyllis Young, an organizer on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation—made famous in 2016 when thousands of young people took up the cause to stop a pipeline from being built near tribal lands—told the AP.
Young said the GOP’s overt voter suppression "is only making us more aware of our rights, more energized, and more likely to vote this November."

SNIP
Tribes participating in the effort include the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Spirit Lake Nation, and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

Second, Four Directions is helping tribes create residential addresses where none have existed before. Using satellite imagery, voters can point to the locations of their homes on a map and are assigned unique address identifiers—even on the spot. On Election Day, tribal officials will be stationed at every polling site in every reservation in the state, with tribal letterhead in hand, ready to assign addresses.

“This is democracy at work!” Four Directions tweeted on Oct. 30. “Voter engagement is high. We have DOUBLED Absentee votes at Standing Rock as of 3:47 pm today.”

Celebrities including Mark Ruffalo and Dave Matthews have also gotten involved, with the Stand-N-Vote initiative, which hopes to capitalize on resentment against the voting restrictions, and the national awareness of the Standing Rock Sioux, to enable more Native Americans to vote.

“This is democracy at work!”