(film reel clattering) - Welcome to today's Ethnic Media Services news briefing, and it's in partnership with ICT, formerly Indian Country Today and FNX TV.

I'm Mark Trahant, editor-at-large for ICT, and the moderator.

Our focus today is on the power of the Native American vote nationally and in key states in the wake of redistricting across-- in dozens of voter restriction laws at the state level.

ICT, of course, has been covering this process for many years.

And looking at two years ago, part of the reason for so many of the actions is some of the success of people on the ground organizing the Native vote.

I'm pleased to have this opportunity to hear from a really remarkable panel of experts on the fight for fair representation in Indian Country with our ethnic media colleagues.

Our speakers today include Jacqueline De León, special counsel for the Native American Rights Fund; Derrick Beetso, a professor with Arizona State University Law School and, I should add, a member of the board for IndiJ Public Media, which is ICT.

Nicole Donaghy, founder and director of North Dakota Native Vote, and Nicole Borromeo with the Alaska Federation of Natives.

Now, we begin with Jacqueline De León of the Native American Rights Fund.

- My name is Jacqueline De León.

I am a staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund.

I'm a member of the Isleta Pueblo and I'm proud to lead NARF's voting rights work.

NARF, as you may know, is the nation's largest and oldest non-profit law firm dedicated to advancing the rights of Native Americans for over 50 years.

For the past 10 of those years, NARF has been growing our voting rights practice group, and over the past five years that work has accelerated dramatically as the unprecedented attacks on our democracy have continued to grow more and more bold.

NARF has responded.

We have built a coalition of Native national organizations and national voting rights organizations, regional and local tribal organizations, tribes and academics with the goal of solving the problem of how and why Native American turnout has been historically so low.

As part of that effort, I co-led a series of field hearings across Indian Country directly asking Native communities, "why aren't you voting?"

And, the answers were compiled in a nearly 200-page report, "Obstacles at Every Turn: "Barriers to Political Participation faced by Native Americans."

It can be found at vote.narf.org, along with a host of other resources for press, Native American advocates and tribal communities.

That report details the absurd structural barriers that face Native American communities, from unreasonably far away Election Day polling places that can be over a hundred miles round trip to access, lack of registration opportunities, and lack of residential mail delivery, and addressing on homes that make registration and receiving a ballot difficult or impossible.

These structural deficiencies are compounded by poverty, poor road conditions, and lack of access to reliable transportation that can handle the often winter weather in November.

But, these are not just structural barriers that occur out of nowhere.

They're a reflection of the purposeful exclusion of Native Americans in the American politic, and a continued and ongoing hostility towards Native Americans voting, and getting the representation and resources that they're entitled to as American citizens, as well as tribal citizens.

And, we know that fear is animating increased voting barriers against Native Americans.

Across the country, we've seen a dramatic rise in laws that are aimed at making it difficult or impossible for Native Americans to vote.

And the reason is because the Native American vote has the power to swing a host of elections this coming year.

Native Americans have swung elections in Alaska, whether that be for Senator Murkowski, or recently in the election of Alaska Native Congresswoman Mary Peltola.

Native Americans swung elections for Senator Tester in Montana and Senator Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota.

President Biden's victory in Arizona was credited to Native Americans and the populations of voting-age eligible Native Americans can swing elections in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada.

Native American votes are being excluded from the table because there is power in these votes.

NARF has responded with a host of litigation.

We recently won a nearly 200-page order in the state court of Montana where we challenged a ban on ballot collection and a ban on Election Day registration.

We partnered with the ACLU and Harvard's Election Law Clinic to challenge these laws.

And in that case, the legislature was well aware that banning ballot collection and Election Day registration in Montana would disproportionately impact Native Americans.

That's because we had just won a case the previous year for another law that banned ballot collections when Native Americans don't have residential mail delivery and where Election Day voting is over a hundred miles away.

But they passed the same, substantively, same law again.

And, the court found evidence of intentional discrimination because the legislature knew of these burdens but passed the law anyway.

This is the type of hostility that we're seeing across the country.

We've also recently filed suit in Alaska where the rejection rates of rural ballots where Native Americans live is exceptionally high.

Another area where litigation is ongoing is around redistricting.

NARF launched the largest redistricting project in Indian Country history, and from that we filed numerous lawsuits in North Dakota, which you'll hear about, and in South Dakota.

South Dakota is also particularly interesting because in that case, the county agreed that their lawsuit violated the Voting Rights Act, and yet they nevertheless delayed implementation of a fair plan for years.

We're also pushing back against recent cases that have been brought in the Supreme Court and the increasing attack on our ability to bring these cases under the Voting Rights Act and under state courts.

In two of these cases this docket, NARF is filing and joining amicus briefs that respond to the troubling impact and degradation of the Voting Rights Act in these cases.

We are still in a position where the Voting Rights Act must remain robust and strong.

Across the country, we have seen intentional and purposeful discrimination against Native American communities and we are banding together in order to fight back against that.

We are also encouraging Native Americans across the country to get out, push past these barriers in order to vote.

The reason that these barriers exist is because of the power and potential of the Native American vote.

Thank you so much for having me, and I'm here to answer any questions if you have any.

- Thank you so much, Jacqueline.

Next, we'll hear from Derrick Beetso.

- Yá'át'ééh, Mark.

Yá'át'ééh, everybody.

Good morning to those in Hawaii, Alaska, and the West Coast.

Good afternoon, to everybody else.

As Mark said, my name is Derrick Beetso.

I serve as director of the Indian Gaming and Tribal Self-Governance Programs at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

I'm happy to be here with you guys today.

This week I'm actually in Washington DC and, as luck would have it, I'm teaching this class to students here called Federal Advocacy for the Tribal Client.

And, a lot of what we're doing this week is showing young Native students and non-Native students that are interested in furthering federal Indian law and policy, the lay of the land in our nation's capital.

Things like how to interact with agencies, how Congress is made up, how to spread your message on the Hill within agencies, [video freezes] how to work on issues before the Supreme Court.

And I find myself doing this work and having a good time, but at the same time, we're dealing with very real issues back in Arizona that are related to the foundation of the democracy that we're here to study, how to be a part of.

Right?

And so, I'm glad that you guys are hosting this.

I wanna give a thanks to Ethnic Media Services, to ICT and FNX for creating this opportunity for us to share this information for the public at-large.

In Arizona, we've been dealing with redistricting issues lately as a result of which you mentioned earlier, Mark, the redrawing of the different maps.

I, myself, am a citizen of the Navajo Nation.

I was born in Tuba City, Arizona.

My family is from Coal Mine Mesa, which is right in kind of the south-?

Well, I guess, southwest center of the Navajo Nation in a lot of respects.

And in Arizona, we have a district that is now Congressional District 2, where for a number of years, Congressman O'Halleran was a representative that represented this area of the population.

And as a result of the redistricting maps, which were redrawn recently, there's a real concern about whether or not O'Halleran will be able to continue in this role on behalf of Navajo people.

This has been the representative that has done a lot for our community.

He's had a strong voice on the Hill in this role.

He's fought for a lot of different funding for programs and services to tribal people in this area.

He has staff that are Native and he really understands the community.

But because of the redistricting, the maps were drawn in a way that excluded some portions of a community that includes 25% of a Hispanic community here in Arizona, and instead replaced them with another community called Yavapai County, which has historically been a community that has not been friendly to Indian tribes.

And, I say that this is concerning for a number of reasons, but really you go back to the foundation of the Constitution, the constitutional authority that allows for this redistricting to happen.

In my point of view, and Jacqueline can correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like the purpose of redistricting was to make sure that every vote counted as the country and the demographics of the country change, and people began to move and populate different areas.

Every 10 years, we look at those areas and see whether or not those are a true reflection of the community.

Now, the case here in Arizona is not such a case.

You'll see the same grandmas live in the same house, the same grandpas live in the same house; all the same tribal members live where they've lived.

And, all the different individuals that are impacted in Yavapai County and other counties in Arizona still live in the same area.

You haven't seen a huge influx of different people in or out of these communities, but yet, the maps were redrawn.

And, the only conclusion that we're led to believe is that it was done so for political purposes rather than to make sure that everybody's vote counted the way it should vote.

And so for us in Arizona, I think this is something that we're really gathering and collecting, trying to have a collective voice to try to share this information with others.

But, we're also putting a lot of efforts into get-out-the-vote, and to election protection efforts.

We have a colleague here at the law school, Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, who does amazing work in the election protection realm.

And, she's doing great work getting people mobilized and together to really have a strong get-out-the-vote effort here in Arizona.

I should... Well, I'm in Washington DC right now, but there in Arizona!

And then, also-- and making sure that we have qualified attorneys that understand the different laws and the rights to vote for tribal citizens and making sure that we have individuals helping on the ground on Election Day.

So for us, I wanna echo what Jacqueline said, is that we need to push through these barriers, that these barriers will always be there no matter what we're talking about.

But at the same time, us as tribal peoples have to understand that together and united, we can be stronger and we can help each other overcome those barriers.

So with that, I'll go ahead and turn back over to you, Mark, but I really appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit of Arizona's story here for the group at-large.

Thank you.

- Let's broaden the conversation.

And I wanna bring in Nicole Donaghy, founder and executive director of North Dakota Native Vote.

Nicole, welcome.

- Thank you, Mark.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you for all of you who are in the audience watching.

So, my name is Nicole Montclair-Donaghy.

I'm an enrolled citizen of the sovereign nation of Standing Rock here in North Dakota.

We are located in the south central area of North Dakota, based in Bismarck.

And, I am the executive director of North Dakota Native Vote.

And so, in my previous capacity, I was one of the many organizers that were on the ground back in 2018 that worked against the voter identification law that had the ability to disenfranchise.

Sorry.

I'm a fast talker!

(chuckles) That had the ability to disenfranchise over 5,000 Native American voters.

So, North Dakota claims a rich cultural history of indigenous people that have lived here since time immemorial, yet we face so many challenges [soft audio] when it comes to voting, [normal audio] having access to a polling place.

Since 2013, our communities have faced several attempts to stifle the Native American vote through challenges, through changes to North Dakota's voter ID laws.

In 2017, the state legislature passed a bill which wrote into law the requirement that all voters must have a physical location on their ID cards.

And so, if you don't know anything about reservations, we don't have a traditional gridding system [soft volume] where addresses are located on the house and, no, it does not come to our homes on the reservation.

[normal audio] That was our very early work organizing that work, and since then we've been on the ground in North Dakota engaging in these systems that have historically forgotten about us.

Our biggest challenges is making contact with voters in remote rural communities.

Back in 2018-- back in 2018, there was a lot of organizations here and we were able to turn out over 50% of the Native vote that year.

I think we hit up to 56% of the Native American vote in North Dakota, which was amazing.

We have yet to see that happen.

We have attempts at making the voting laws in North Dakota even more cumbersome.

So, in 2021-- our state legislature meets every odd year.

We meet on a biennium.

There was 21 bills proposed to affect voting, to change voting laws because of the suspicion and the national trend of these conspiracy theories that, you know, we all hear about.

There was 21 bills that were proposed.

Only two of those bills were passed.

We worked alongside NARF to engage our tribal leadership to play defense on that ever-growing attempt to create these voting laws.

Also, in 2021, the redistricting process did happen.

It does begin as a bill in our state and the state legislature is in charge of redrawing these districting lines, and essentially drawing their own lines and keeping them in office or pushing other legislators out.

And so, that process has been-- We inputted-- Gave so much input on that process to make it more equitable, to have more hearings near the reservations, which did not happen.

The closest reservation is [soft audio] Standing Rock, which is 60 miles south of Bismark where all of the meetings happened.

So, we worked alongside NARF to create, write testimony [normal audio] to get people to the capital, to create split house districts.

And, a big major win that came out of that was that we were able to create two split house districts in North Dakota, which was a huge win.

Since then, this year we've seen Native people on the ballot.

We have a record number of Native Americans on the ballot.

We have over ten candidates across eight legislative districts this year.

We're continuing our get-out-the-vote work this year.

We have on-the-ground organizers.

Our model of organizing is to have people in the communities have all the resources that they need and go canvass, talk to people, get them to pledge to vote, answer questions, and distribute information about how, and when and where to vote.

Currently, we're also recruiting poll observers to watch for intimidation tactics and be present to answer questions at the poll.

And so, back in 2018, we've seen blatant attacks on our voters.

We had a lot of people coming in to the polls at the time, and they had incidents of racism, intimidation tactics where the poll workers were threatening to close the polls that day.

And so, we want to make sure that we have a friendly face at the polls, that we have Native people in these positions that are watching and are observant and are there to answer questions should problems arise.

And so, one last thing I'll touch base on is the difficulties that we face this election.

And so, like I mentioned earlier, the voter identification law is still in effect.

There is some...

There was some alleviation of those burdens through the consent decree between the tribes, but overall that law is still in effect.

We have limited polls this year.

I think there's only one polling place open per county in North Dakota.

And out of all of the reservation-based polls, none of them are offering early voting.

There's also an increased push toward voting by mail [soft audio] through the absentee ballot process here in North Dakota, which is also very cumbersome.

[normal audio] The absentee ballot, you have to apply for it and then get a ballot by mail, which is also very confusing because your ID on your voter file does have your physical address, which you don't get mailed at.

And then, lastly, we also want to make sure that there's no more intimidation tactics happening at the polls.

And then-- Yeah.

Sorry.

I'm getting all jumbled up!

And then, also along with the absentee ballot if you do mail your ballot in, the county auditor, secretary of state does not have to require-- or there's no requirement to have a notification sent out to the elector if their ballot was spoiled.

And so, that's something that we're also including in our information packets to our electors.

And so, yeah!

It's going to be super busy.

It's a super exciting time in North Dakota.

We are proud to be a part of the national coalition on voting rights alongside NARF and all of our other colleagues.

And so, I will stop there for questions.

Thank you.

- Nicole Borromeo is with the Alaska Federation of Natives.

Welcome.

- Thanks, Mark.

And, good morning.

Hi, everyone.

It is still morning here in Anchorage.

It's a sunny day and I'm so happy to be able to spend a little bit of time with Indian Country and the world talking about Alaska's recent redistricting process, because it has been the fairest, most transparent process we have ever had as a state.

We were able to adopt a very fair house map.

I'm gonna show you my house map really quick because I'm very proud of the lines and what we were able to do.

When I approached mapping, I looked at the transportation corridors; I looked at the school systems; I looked how neighborhoods are naturally grouped.

We didn't have any voter registration information available to us.

We purposely asked for that to be excluded so that we really focused on what we knew about our communities, right?

Redistricting is challenging.

It's not perfect, right?

But, what we were charged with doing at the board level is coming up with a map that would be favorable to Alaska on balance as a whole.

All 40 of these districts were tied into each other, right?

Because whatever line I did here, let's say in District 16, it would impact 14 and that might impact 13 and 20 and 19 and 21.

And then, it's just a rippling effect.

It's a domino effect.

Any time you move the line, you impact another district.

And, we were happy with the process.

We thought that we would take a break for the weekend, come back.

We would make the senate pairings; it would be a slam dunk; everybody would go home, and that's not what happened.

This is where things really went off the tracks here in Alaska was with the senate pairings.

Because what happened was one of the board members went on record, and this is a happy function of the pandemic.

We had this technology sitting on the table called an Owl that would pick up all of our sound and all of our side discussions that we were having.

And, we were talking about the senate pairings.

These two districts right here, 23 and 28, this is what we call Muldoon, in Anchorage.

This is north Muldoon and south Muldoon.

It's one community of interest; high concentration of minority voters here.

And, one of my colleagues on the redistricting board wanted to pair south Muldoon with Eagle River in 24.

There is no road connecting 18 and 24.

In fact, there is a mountain range.

And in order to travel from 18 to 24, a resident needs to drive down Muldoon, link up with the Glenn Highway here, come up and then exit into Eagle River.

There is essentially no transactions going on between these two districts.

But, why she wanted the pairing was because 24 is a very conservative, white voting district.

And, she wanted to drown out the votes in District 18 and pushing both of the votes into minority communities, so that they could have a bigger population-- Sorry!

A bigger "control" of the Alaska state senate.

And, she actually went on record saying that that's what she was doing to actually expand Eagle River's reach in the senate.

This set off a lot of fireworks at the board level.

Alaskans became very engaged in the redistricting process at this point, and enraged.

Unfortunately, Melanie [Bahnke] and I did not have the votes to stop this from happening.

So, we did adopt an initial proclamation that split Muldoon and split Eagle River for the purpose of what was a partisan gerrymander.

Then, the board was sued immediately.

The trial court judge issued a scathing 192-page opinion in which the trial court found for the very first time that the board had engaged in a partisan gerrymander against Alaska's constitution.

They appealed the decision to the supreme court.

The supreme court upheld the trial court's finding.

So, we have the first case law in the country that says partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional.

So, that was a real added bonus for me as a lawyer to be able to affect case law for the first time, and to create case law that is favorable going forward.

Again, we thought that this would be done and over with, that the gerrymaderers would stop.

But, oh no; they doubled down.

We were sued for a second time; this time by Alaskans from District 9.

And, that went to the supreme court once again.

At this point in the process, the board had completely broken down.

Our communications with our council had completely broken down.

Me and Melanie were not brought into any of the decisions regarding the litigation process.

And as a result, when the board decided to appeal the decision to sue us again over our partisan gerrymandering, we didn't hold a board meeting about it.

The first time I found out about the decision was when I read the public pleadings myself and the supreme court at that point, put the brakes on what we were doing.

We had to come back to the table at that point and adopt the map that the supreme court said to adopt, which was not partisan gerrymandered because they did not appreciate us changing one district for another and continuing to gerrymander.

So, where we're at-?

- [Mark] Yeah, we'll have to leave it there.

We have a hard out coming up pretty quick.

- Oh, okay!

- I do wanna-- And, I'm sorry we're out of time 'cause I'd really like to hear about rank choice voting, and some other things going on in Alaska!

Like to thank everyone for being here today and for participating.

It was very interesting.

We heard about efforts in North Dakota, Montana, Arizona and, of course, Alaska.

And really the opportunity to try to increase voting, Native American voting across the country.

And, we look at the cycles.

It's always interesting because in some off-- This is an off-presidential year, and really that to me as a journalist is one of the best things to measure because that really shows what people are doing in ordinary time.

And when you can get people motivated, then you can really see some sticking power.

So, thank you very much for participating and feel free to ping us with further questions, if you have them later.

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