Advocates Push for Washington Native Voter Data, Participation

TRISTAN AHTONE, National Minority Consortia: It's a grey, wet day on the Tulalip reservation, just 30 minutes north of Seattle. The infamous weather has left fog stuck in pine boughs and the streets wet with rain. Despite the weather, Theresa Sheldon is going door to door registering Native American voters.

THERESA SHELDON, Native Vote Washington: Hello, how are you doing?

RESERVATION RESIDENT: Okay.

THERESA SHELDON: My name's Theresa, we're just going around, we're with Native Vote working Tulalip Tribes on registering people to vote.

RESERVATION RESIDENT: Oh.

THERESA SHELDON: And so we were just coming to see if you need to get registered or if anyone here needs to get registered to vote?

TRISTAN AHTONE: Sheldon is the co-chair of Native Vote Washington, a non-partisan voter advocacy group based on the Tulalip reservation. She carries voter registration forms, flyers, a clipboard and a pen.

Today, Sheldon is joined by five other volunteers. They've been registering voters all year long at community events, powwows, festivals and other gatherings, but today is the first time they've gone door to door.

THERESA SHELDON: A lot of times when you do powwows or do certain places it's the same people who go to the powwows so you're sort of hitting the same group of individuals over and over again, and so to really connect to everyone you have to change up the different events you go to.

TRISTAN AHTONE: Native Vote Washington's work is a bit different then most voter registration drives. There is no data available on Native voters in Washington State, so they're starting from the ground and up and going door to door to see who's there.

According to Chris Stearns, in-house lawyer and press director for Native Vote Washington, Natives have played key roles in a number of elections both in and out of Washington State. What he hopes to do is create the first-ever database of Native voters in Washington. The problem stems from a lack of documentation. He says having solid numbers on Native voters will push candidates to pay attention to Indian issues.

CHRIS STEARNS, Native Vote Washington: But they're not going to want to probably do that based on just, sort of, anecdotal evidence, so we hope to change that.

TRISTAN AHTONE: But despite Stearns' goal to create a database for the state of Washington, his efforts have been hampered by a number of data issues. The first being the U.S. Census and how it tracks voters.

CHRIS STEARNS: They've actually tracked minority votes -- black, Latino, women -- anything for 2004. The one thing they did not track were American Indian voters, so there's a big giant asterisk in their 2004 report.

TRISTAN AHTONE: A few states have begun to track Native voters, but for the most part, there are only educated guesses when it comes to Native Americans and their voting habits.

Among his many titles, Russ Lehman is a professor at Evergreen State College and served as managing director for the Native Vote Report.

Released in 2004, the Native Vote Report was written for the National Congress of American Indians and became one of the first and only surveys to examine Native voters nationwide. He's had first-hand experience with the data and says that it's a complicated matter.

RUSS LEHMAN, Native Vote Report: It's very hard to find Indian voters even on reservations, because you're combining census data with county auditor data and tribal data which is hard to come by sometimes, and you have to go voting place by voting place. It's very hard, and now with more mail-in voting, it's almost impossible in certain places.

TRISTAN AHTONE: Lehman is skeptical of any group or organization working toward a Native Vote database based on his experiences with the data. First off, data sets only focus on reservation voters, and because reservations are not 100 percent Native, those figures are only somewhat reliable.

The other problem is that researchers can only focus on reservation voters because there is no way to track Indians that live in urban areas. Urban Indians do not stay concentrated in neighborhoods like other ethnic groups, and are constantly on the move. With nearly half of all Native Americans living in urban areas, these efforts leave out a huge block of potential voters. However, Lehman hopes that both sets of data are available one day in order to move to the next step.

RUSS LEHMAN: The bigger part of the story is finding out, which you can only do in person, finding out who is voting and who isn't in Indian country and then find out why. For those that are not participating in the system, why are you not participating and what has to happen to get you involved in the system? To me, that's where the action is, and that's a big task, but it has to be done.

TRISTAN AHTONE: If you walk into the Democratic Party's headquarters in Seattle, you'll see a typical campaign in full swing -- volunteers making phone calls, organizers working to capture Latino or African American voters. But there's one section of the office running a different campaign: the Native vote project.

Rebecca George is the director of the Native Vote Project and a member of the Port Gamble S'Klallam tribe. Without data to pinpoint native voters or their issues, George is running a campaign from scratch.

REBECCA GEORGE, Native Vote Project: I think that makes my job a lot different from say the Latino vote project, who already had the numbers to begin with. He's running a totally different kind of program then what I'm running, so he is running what you call more of a typical campaign effort where we're really working to build a foundation within the Party.

TRISTAN AHTONE: When George started her job, there were only eight, self-identified Native voters registered with the Washington Democratic Party. That was mid-June. Today, there are 4,000 identified voters in the party's records. The goal is to hit 10,000 before November 4th, and George hopes her efforts will provide a base for future campaign outreach.

REBECCA GEORGE: We could work to identify who they support, and then if there are people who support our candidates -- really work on them out and making sure that they turn out to vote.

TRISTAN AHTONE: So we're kind of behind in education, health care and in campaign stuff?

REBECCA GEORGE: [Laughs] I don't think we're behind, I think that we're just becoming part of the process and understanding that it doesn't threaten our tribal sovereignty and that it is a right that we have as Native people.

TRISTAN AHTONE: Representatives at the Washington State Republican Party were unaware of any similar program to specifically reach out to Native voters. Washington has not gone to the GOP in a presidential election since 1984. With seven Republican offices operating in the state right now, the party hopes to influence the national election, but is focused on local races.

In what promises to be a tight governor's race this year, Democratic incumbent Christine Gregoire will be going up against Republican Dino Rossi. In 2004, Rossi lost to Gregoire by 133 votes. Rossi's heritage is both Italian and Tlingit and according to Chris Stearns, Rossi made a campaign stop at the Seafair Powwow two weeks ago.

CHRIS STEARNS: He told the audience if you elect me I'll be the first native governor in the U.S., it's kind of cool. On the other hand, at best he's sending mixed messages.

TRISTAN AHTONE: Stearns says the mixed message comes from ads currently being run by Rossi.

MAN IN DINO ROSSI CAMPAIGN AD: Why should you listen to a couple of old hoots tell you who to vote for governor? Because we're casino experts!
WOMAN: If losing makes you an expert.
MAN: In Connecticut, casinos handed the state $430 million. In Washington, Gregoire cut a deal with the Indian Casinos to pay zero. Same Gregoire who benefited from $650,000 in Indian casino contributions.
WOMAN: There's a name for that: pay off! Quid-pro-quo!
MAN: No Mildred, people may think this is one of those negative ads.

TRISTAN AHTONE: Stearns calls the ads bad campaigning when it comes to capturing the Native vote.

CHRIS STEARNS: I don't know what else to say, yeah, I think he understands on a very personal level that he lost by 133 votes. Those are easy Indian votes if he can make the argument that he's good for Indian country. But you can't go to Seafair and say I'm going to do all this for you and expect people to buy it if they turn on their TV sets that evening and there's an ad that governor Gregoire took an illegal pay off from Indian tribes.

TRISTAN AHTONE: Russ Lehman agrees and says that the unusual twist in identity politics proves that Native voters aren't always that much different than non-native voters.

RUSS LEHMAN: Even though there is a white women against a white male with Indian heritage, that in fact, Indians will vote for the person who is really good for them, and who understands them and who has been sympathetic to their issues, and in this case that appears to be Chris Gregoire.

TRISTAN AHTONE: Back on Tulalip Reservation, the Native Vote Washington team is doing well.

NATIVE VOTE WASHINGTON VOLUNTEER: Did you get one registered?
VOLUNTEER: I did
VOLUNTEER: Sweet, she got one!

TRISTAN AHTONE: Except for two counties, Washington voters mail in their ballots instead of going to the polls. For Chris Stearns, this provides an opportunity to get Indian people to the polls.

CHRIS STEARNS: So mail in voting has a huge advantage because you can get people to come to the community center or the chapter house, wherever it is, and you can collect their ballots and then mail them for them.

TRISTAN AHTONE: In Washington State, the last day to register to vote was October 4th. For new voters, the deadline is October 15th.

For the Online NewsHour, I'm Tristan Ahtone.