In North Dakota, Tribes Scramble To Clear GOP-Imposed Voter ID Hurdle
By Blake Nicholson
October 26, 2018 7:10 am
BELCOURT, N.D. (AP) — Locating a house isn’t easy on the isolated and impoverished Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in northern North Dakota, and that’s making it more difficult for residents and their counterparts on other reservations in the state to vote this election.
To cast a ballot, they need identification with a provable street address — something that isn’t important to the 19,000 people who live on the remote 72-square-mile block of land where most streets have no signs. In their culture, they’ve never needed them.
Tribal activist Wes Davis, 37, an official at the local community college and a lifelong reservation resident, describes where he lives this way — to the west of a gas station on the east side of town, behind the high school and across the road from another store.
“This is literally how we explain where we live here on the reservation, because that’s the way it’s been our whole lives,” Davis said. “People will understand because whenever we think of physical addresses, we think of infrastructure, or we think of pastures, or we think of families who live in a spot and we live alongside of them, those types of things. We don’t think of streets and avenues.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/in-north-dakota-tribes-scramble-to-clear-gop-voter-id-hurdle
Hey Secretary of State Al Jaeger, .................your ilk keep forgetting the Standing Rock / Turtle Mountain tribes are a sovereign nation your right wing fascist courts keep forgetting that also, since they are belong to the Federalist society and don't believe in the Constitution...........................and your bogyman BS is just that BS.....................
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The voter ID issue in North Dakota has galvanized the tribes, according to Azure.
“It’s unifying the people,” he said. “It’s getting people interested, it’s getting people looking at the issues, looking at the candidates.”
Colten Birkland, 19, who is voting on Turtle Mountain for the first time this November, is one of them.
“In the end, we’re going to do whatever we can to vote, and that’s the bottom line,” he said.