COVID-19 has disproportionately sickened or killed Native Americans across the U.S., creating another Election Day challenge for a poor and geographically isolated population already fighting to overcome steep voting barriers ranging from discriminatory election laws to distant polling stations.
Though this election has seen many Americans turn to voting by mail to avoid COVID-19 exposure, someIndigenous Americans risk having their votes ignored given the limited and inefficient nature of postal service on many rural reservations. Spotty internet access also makes it challenging to access information on how to vote in a pandemic.
Tribes struggle to get out the vote as it is. Only 1.8 million Native Americans voted in 2016, about half the eligible voters among the nation’s 5.2 million Indigenous peoples scattered across nearly 600 tribes, 30% of whom live on reservations.
Despite a perennially low voter turnout, which Native American voting rights activists are working hard to boost, those who do come out on Election Day could prove critical as President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden vie for votes in tightly contested states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona.
Four Directions, a voting rights group that backed the lawsuit, recently tested mail services on the Navajo Nation and found first-class mail took 18 hours to arrive at a county recorder’s office from urban Scottsdale, Arizona, compared with six days for letters traveling from Navajo country.
“If middle-class white people had to go through the barriers Navajos do, white voter turnout would plummet,” says O.J. Semans, co-executive director of Four Directions, headquartered at the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in Mission, South Dakota. “The pandemic scares me. The closing of polling stations scares me. But Native Americans are ready to cast their ballots.”
Read more: USA Today; 10/25/20
