Federal Judge Allows to Block Native Americans in North Dakota from Voting

Filing: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5026639-Complaint-Cl...

Ruling: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5026691-Hovland-orde...

Granting the previous injunction in 2016: http://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/north-dakota-p...

I'm still missing some relevant links... Was this denied cert at some point?

Please comment with links if you have others. The coverage of this seems to miss the distinction in the different phases of this litigation.

It's really frustrating to watch this continued, unabated effort to seize and keep power at all costs by the Republicans.

By targeting rural voters they end up with hugely disproportionate numbers in the senate, the house, and the electoral college.

By shuttering polling places they impact the poor and minorities.

Through incarceration, and disenfranchisement, and voter roll purging they remove the voices of millions throughout this nation who would most likely vote for Democrats.

And through the passage of voter ID laws, and voter address laws they continue their efforts to diminish the authority of this "democracy".

It's time for this shit to stop. Our citizens deserve to have their voices heard no matter what the color of their skin, or what's in their bank accounts.

We should abolish the electoral college, and redraw senate districts to be one hundred equal population centers that're redrawn every twenty years based on the census.

No more should we let someone who lives in Rhode Island or Wisconsin have forty or sixty times the representation in the Senate by virtue of where they lived in deference to our founding fathers who lived in a time when black people were 3/5ths that of white people, women couldn't vote, and who generally owned literal human slaves.

No more should 80,000 voters in three states over ride the will of 3,000,000 in all 50 by virtue of the electoral college which was designed to prevent the election of the dangerous demagogue we see on our TVs and hear about in the news every day.

No more should the people of Washington D.C. be without meaningful representation in our halls of congress.

How many more wars in Iraq, how much more unnecessary suffering in Puerto Rico, how many more people shot in school shootings while we refuse to do anything the majority of Americans support, how many more people incarcerated because they couldn't afford bail or were caught on nonviolent drug offenses will we endure before we've had enough?

Today, I implore you to get out and vote. To become politically motivated. And to call your representatives from time to time. To talk to your friends. And to feel empathy for those so callously tossed aside by those who wield power in this great nation.

We're better than this.

> Terry Yellow Fat is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe who lives in Fort Yates, North Dakota. Several years ago, the government put up a sign on his street that said “Buffalo Avenue,” so he assumed he lived on Buffalo Avenue. But when he asked the sheriff for his “911 address”—the location used for emergency services—he was told he lived on 1343 92nd St. In fact, that’s the address of a liquor store down the street from his house, yet the state now considers it to be his official address. Yellow Fat is thus caught in a Catch-22: To vote, he must produce an ID listing his address as 1343 92nd St. But if he uses that address to vote, he will be violating the law, because it is not actually the “fixed permanent dwelling” at which he resides.

If the state insists X lives at Y, then isn't that his "fixed permanent dwelling"? What causes the difference?

EDIT: The rejected appeal document has more information.

> The Secretary contends that he will succeed on appeal because none of the six plaintiffs has Article III standing to challenge the statute’s requirement that a voter provide a current residential street address. The Secretary observes that each of the six plaintiffs has a current residentialstreet address, and argues that the statute did not cause any of them to suffer an injury in fact. The district court concluded that the plaintiffs had standing to sue, because “the burden of having to obtain and produce an ID itself has been found sufficient to confer standing, regardless of whether the Plaintiffs are able to obtain an ID.”

This seems to imply that Yellow Fat does have a valid "current residential street address".

> In this case, plaintiff Elvis Norquay presented evidence that he currently resides at a homeless apartment complex in Dunseith, but that his tribal identification lists a “prior” address in Belcourt. To vote in the precinct where he currently resides, therefore, Norquay must either obtain a new form of identification with his current residential street address or a supplemental document that includes his current address. That burden is sufficient to give him standing to challenge the residential street address requirement.

Looks like the law is an unconstitutional burden to any currently homeless person.

And the argument as to why the stay was rejected:

> Here, the district court thought the statutory requirement to produce an identification with a current residential street address posed a legal obstacle to the right to vote for Native Americans, because Native American communities often lack residential street addresses. The Secretary disputes whether street addresses are truly lacking in those communities, and complains that the district court mistakenly relied on outdated evidence about two counties that had not finished assigning addresses as of 2011. But even assuming that some communities lack residential street addresses, that fact does not justify a statewide injunction that prevents the Secretary from requiring a form of identification with a residential street address from the vast majority of residents who have residential street addresses.

The initial argument seems reasonable(if the district court did indeed rely on evidence that was untrue, then it makes sense to reverse the decision), but I don't understand the secondary part. Apparently(from reading the rest of the document), the government is allowed to impose a burden on voting, like ID registration, as long as it only negatively impacts a small part of the population, and that part of the population is allowed to petition courts for relief for themselves, however the specific 6 petitioners failed in this challenge because they already had current residential street addresses.

The decision seems logical, but the end outcome is still frustrating. The rejection doesn't really address the crux of the issue(how many people are affected and if so, why isn't the law unconstitutional?), and the plaintiffs didn't seem to have a good case to present(since they were, allegedly, not affected by the law).

I don't like that the article seems to misrepresent the situation(it claims that TYF cannot vote because they lack a residential address, but the appeal rejection implies they do).