Can someone explain how the necessity of residential address is handled for homeless people(who presumably also have the right to vote)? Also, how is this possible:
> 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).