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Shannon County, Pine Ridge move to protect voting rights |
Fallout from Fall River resignation threats
By Stephanie Woodard, Today correspondent
PINE RIDGE, S.D. -- Native Americans have never had easy access to the ballot in South Dakota. However, with the official responsible for elections in Shannon County giving 30 days' notice of intent to resign, the county's commission is working quickly to ensure its residents -- almost entirely Oglala Sioux Tribe members living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation -- will get to the polls at all this fall. Time is tight. The national election is about to begin in South Dakota, starting with six weeks of early voting on Sept. 18 and finishing on election day, Nov. 2.
The election official, county auditor Sue Ganje, is one of several staffers from adjacent Fall River County who are paid to administer non-tribal government functions, including elections, by "unorganized" Shannon County. Reached just after the Sept. 3 meeting during which five Fall River officials gave notice, Ganje said she and three others acted in solidarity with state's attorney, Jim Sword, who also announced he'll resign. The Rapid City Journal has repeatedly reported Sword's adversarial relationship with his Shannon County employers, and a review of his contract was on the meeting's agenda.
"Our action was based on the fact of Jim Sword's contract being put on the agenda," said Ganje, who refused to elaborate. When asked how the national election, including both early and election-day voting, would be administered in Shannon County in her absence, she answered, "That will be the question, I guess."
To answer that question, Shannon County Commission Chairwoman Connie Whirlwind Horse, Oglala Lakota, said over Labor Day weekend that she would consult Ganje, Oglala Sioux Tribe president Theresa Two Bulls, South Dakota attorney general Marty Jackley and other officials. "We're going to work it out. We can get help from the state, and we can find people to run this election."
The state may have to step up to the plate, said Bryan Sells, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project. "South Dakota has delegated election responsibilities to its counties, but ultimately the state is responsible for ensuring that everyone has an equal right to vote."
This is just one more crisis in Native Americans' struggle for equal access to South Dakota ballot boxes, said O.J. Semans, Sicangu Lakota, director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit voting-rights group Four Directions. "We're not asking to be special; we're asking to be equal."
Uneven availability of early voting has been an issue in South Dakota. Native people there generally have difficulty getting access to this type of absentee ballot, which is consistently offered in predominantly white areas and e-mailed to members of the military. On Aug. 18, Two Bulls requested that Fall River County provide the standard six weeks in Shannon County, which got just two days of early voting in 2008, with too few ballots provided for the turnout. Todd County, which encompasses the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, got one day in 2008.
This year, Dewey County, which is within the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, will offer early voting in the county seat, but not at the tribal hall, according to county auditor Adele Enright. That's another form of unequal access, said Semans. "White people do government-related business at the county seat, so may go there during the six-week period, thus saving themselves an extra trip to vote. With South Dakota's long distances and today's high gas prices, that's an advantage. Native people, in contrast, tend to do business at the tribal hall, so must make a special trip to cast a ballot they might otherwise have cast days or weeks earlier."
Enright defended her decision, saying she didn't have staff for additional early polling locations and that on Nov. 2, 13 precincts would be open around the county.
Staffing and other financial roadblocks could have been dealt with, had the state used Help America Vote Act funds, said state Sen. Ben Nesselhuf. A Democratic candidate for secretary of state, Nesselhuf called South Dakota's early voting system "systematic disenfranchisement" of Native citizens.
Native people who made it to the ballot box in past elections ran a gauntlet. The night before the November 2004 general election, the U.S. District Court for South Dakota, in an emergency session, forbade Charles Mix County police from tailing Yankton Sioux tribal members to the polls. That same election, Fall River County sheriff's vehicles were parked near Shannon County polling places, which had the effect of intimidating Indian voters, wrote ACLU Voting Rights Project Director Laughlin McDonald in the American Indian Law Review. Such police activities gave Native people the impression that rumors of voting-related dragnets targeting Indians were likely to be true, Semans said.
Attorney Greg Lembrich, legal advisor to Four Directions and a senior associate at the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, has been an election observer in South Dakota for a decade. "I have watched people outside a polling place telling Native Americans it was actually elsewhere. I've heard Native voters threatened, as in ‘I know your boss; I'll get you fired.'"
Closely contested elections exacerbate problems, said Semans. With Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, a Democrat, fighting to retain her congressional seat this fall, he foresees a flood of party operatives and a replay of unsubstantiated, but widely reported, rumors of Native election fraud. When former South Dakota attorney general Mark Barnett investigated 50 such charges in 2002, he found them baseless and termed a National Review article reporting them "sensationalist and garbage."
Despite the obstacles, voting on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations has more than doubled in recent years, said Lembrich. "From 2000 to 2004, the number of votes cast in Shannon County increased 122 percent, while Todd County was up 139 percent." This fall, Rosebud will have four-and-a-half weeks of early voting, said Kathleen Flakus, auditor of nearby Tripp County, which will provide the polling place. Whirlwind Horse is aiming for Shannon County to get six weeks this year.
Electoral participation means improvements in reservation residents' lives, said Lembrich. "Here are just two examples: Water projects were expanded to bring running water to many rural Indian communities, and attempts to cut funding for tribal colleges were defeated."
The journey to the ballot box is not over, though. On Sept. 1, the ACLU petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review a case concerning redistricting that ensures white voters in Martin, S.D. control all three city council seats, while the Native 45 percent of the population has no representation. "American Indian voters, who make up almost half of [Martin's] voting population, effectively have no voice in their government," Sells said.
Is Sells confident of prevailing? So far, he said, all of about 20 completed voting rights suits in South Dakota have been won by Native plaintiffs or settled in their favor.
"This is the United States of America in the 21st century," Semans said. "Native people are going to vote."
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