North Dakota’s Racist Voter ID Law Is Already Backfiring

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A last-ditch effort to block enforcement of a law aimed at Native Americans has failed in court. But the law has also triggered a backlash—and thousands have new credentials.

Jay Michaelson
11.01.18

North Dakota’s Native American communities suffered a setback on Thursday, as a court ruled that the state’s voter suppression law can remain in effect for this year’s election. But outrage over the law has led to a huge backlash and grassroots efforts to help people vote despite the law.

In 2012, now-Sen. Heidi Heitkamp won a surprise, razor-thin victory to become North Dakota’s only statewide elected Democrat. She won by fewer than 3,000 votes. There are roughly 30,000 Native Americans in North Dakota, roughly 5 percent of the state population, and they overwhelmingly supported Heitkamp.

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North Dakota’s Native American communities suffered a setback on Thursday, as a court ruled that the state’s voter suppression law can remain in effect for this year’s election. But outrage over the law has led to a huge backlash and grassroots efforts to help people vote despite the law.

In 2012, now-Sen. Heidi Heitkamp won a surprise, razor-thin victory to become North Dakota’s only statewide elected Democrat. She won by fewer than 3,000 votes. There are roughly 30,000 Native Americans in North Dakota, roughly 5 percent of the state population, and they overwhelmingly supported Heitkamp.

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So the North Dakota law will be in effect next week. But 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.

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Young’s own address was, until she had it changed this year, “7 miles by highway marker 14 by the Porcupine turnoff.”

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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.

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Regardless of the result of this year’s election, North Dakota voter suppression has backfired: Thousands of newly credentialed Native American voters have shifted the electoral math in North Dakota.

And they are angry. Alexis Davis, 19, chairwoman of the Turtle Mountain Youth Council, told the AP, “It’s like, oh you want to make this harder for me? Oh, you want to take away my rights? It’s like, no, now I’m going to fight that, and I’m going to be more resilient, and I’m going to make sure that I’m going to go vote.”