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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe SC order could hurt the reelection chances of Heidi Heitkamp, the most vulnerable....
Oh,damn. she did the right thing and now this. I agree with RBG -below!
Supreme Court Makes It Harder for Tribal North Dakotans to Vote
The order could hurt the reelection chances of Heidi Heitkamp, the most vulnerable Democratic senator.
Pema Levy October 9, 2018 5:44 PM
Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) faces a tougher road to reelection after Tuesday's ruling.Jay Mallin/ZUMA
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Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was sworn in on Monday, did not partake in the decision, and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan dissented.
North Dakotas 2017 voter law ID was challenged by Native residents who alleged that the law disproportionately blocked Native Americans from voting. In April, a federal district court judge blocked large portions of the law as discriminatory against Native voters. The State has acknowledged that Native American communities often lack residential street addresses, Judge Daniel Hovland wrote. Nevertheless, under current State law an individual who does not have a current residential street address will never be qualified to vote. According to the website of the Native American Rights Fund, which represents the plaintiffs, many native residents lack residential street addresses because the U.S. postal service does not provide residential delivery in these rural Indian communities.As a result, tribal IDs use P.O. boxes, which are not sufficient under North Dakotas new lawa specification that seems designed to disenfranchise native voters. Hovlands ruling was in place during the primaries this spring.
But in September, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the law to go into effect. The Supreme Court upheld that ruling Tuesday. In her dissent, Ginsburg argued that the Supreme Courts order was at odds with one of the top courts most frequently invoked doctrines on election law: not to change the rules right before an election. By allowing a different set of ID rules in the general election from in the primary, Ginsburg warned, the court was risking widespread confusion and disenfranchisement.
The risk of voter confusion appears severe here because the injunction against requiring residential-address identification was in force during the primary election and because the Secretary of States website announced for months the ID requirements as they existed under that injunction, Ginsburg wrote. Reasonable voters may well assume that the IDs allowing them to vote in the primary election would remain valid in the general election. If the Eighth Circuits stay is not vacated, the risk of disfranchisement is large.
Ginsburg noted that according to the factual record of the case, about 20 percent of voters likely to try to cast a ballot in the midterms will lack the required identification. Another approximately18,000 North Dakota residents also lack supplemental documentation sufficient to permit them to vote without a qualifying ID, she noted.................
TexasTowelie
(112,128 posts)Thanks.
Codeine
(25,586 posts)Goddamn.
msongs
(67,395 posts)scarletwoman
(31,893 posts)That is so fucked up!!! How else is one to take this as anything but a deliberate "fuck you" to the indigenous tribal people of North Dakota?
And the fact that this ruling came down so late in the election season means there's not sufficient time to craft any kind of remedy.
If there were time enough, the tribal governments could conceivably establish a system of street addresses on the reservations - nothing to do with mail delivery, just numbers and street names to signify physical locations. Then the reservation inhabitants could get new IDs with the requisite street addresses.
But, of course, the timing of this disgusting ruling left no such remedy possible - even if the tribes were able to organize such an effort in a way that would reach all their members who wanted to be able to vote. Reservations are not like towns, people are spread out all over.
And even if reservations were able to assign physical addresses to everyone, there would still be the question of whether the state would accept them or not - could North Dakota decide that it doesn't consider those arbitrary, non-postal related "street" addresses not valid?
To think, we are doomed to live with a right wing Supreme Court for decades to come...