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How G.O.P. Legal guidelines in Montana Might Complicate Voting for Native People

How G.O.P. Laws in Montana Could Complicate Voting for Native Americans

STARR SCHOOL, Mont. — One week before the 2020 election, Laura Roundine had emergency open-heart surgery. She returned to her home on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation with blunt instructions: Don’t go anywhere while you recover, because if you get Covid-19, you’ll probably die.

That meant Ms. Roundine, 59, couldn’t vote in person as planned. Neither could her husband, lest he risk bringing the virus home. It wasn’t safe to go to the post office to vote by mail, and there is no home delivery here in Starr School — or on much of the reservation in northwestern Montana.

The couple’s saving grace was Renee LaPlant, a Blackfeet community organizer for the Native American advocacy group Western Native Voice, who ensured that their votes would count by shuttling applications and ballots back and forth between their home and a satellite election office in Browning, one of two on the roughly 2,300-square-mile reservation.

But under H.B. 530, a law passed this spring by the Republican-controlled State Legislature, that would not have been allowed. Western Native Voice pays its organizers, and paid ballot collection is now banned.

“It’s taking their rights from them, and they still have the right to vote,” Ms. Roundine said of fellow Blackfeet voters who can’t leave their homes. “I wouldn’t have wanted that to be taken from me.”

The ballot collection law is part of a nationwide push by Republican state legislators to rewrite election rules, and is similar to an Arizona law that the Supreme Court upheld on Thursday. In Montana — where Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, was elected in November to replace Steve Bullock, a Democrat who had held veto power for eight years — the effects of that and a separate law eliminating same-day voter registration are likely to fall heavily on Native Americans, who make up about 7 percent of the state’s population.

It has been less than a century since Native Americans in the United States gained the right to vote by law, and they never attained the ability to do so easily in practice. New restrictions — ballot collection bans, earlier registration deadlines, stricter voter ID laws and more — are likely to make it harder, and the starkest consequences may be seen in places like Montana: sprawling, sparsely populated Western and Great Plains states where Native Americans have a history of playing decisive roles in close elections.

In 2018, Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, won seven of eight Montana counties containing the headquarters of a federally recognized tribe and received 50.3 percent of the vote statewide, a result without which his party would not currently control the Senate. (One of the eight tribes wasn’t federally recognized at the time but is now.) In 2016, Mr. Bullock carried the same counties and won with 50.2 percent. Both times, Glacier County, which contains the bulk of the Blackfeet reservation, was the most Democratic in the state.

In recent years, Republicans in several states have passed laws imposing requirements that Native Americans are disproportionately unlikely to meet or targeting voting methods they are disproportionately likely to use, such as ballot collection, which is common in communities where transportation and other infrastructure are limited. They say ballot collection can enable election fraud or allow advocacy groups to influence votes, though there is no evidence of widespread fraud.

On the floor of the Montana House in April, in response to criticism of H.B. 530’s effects on Native Americans who rely on paid ballot collection, the bill’s primary sponsor, State Representative Wendy McKamey, said, “There are going to be habits that are going to have to change because we need to keep our security at the utmost.” She argued that the bill would keep voting as “uninfluenced by monies as possible.”

Ms. McKamey did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Geography, poverty and politics all create obstacles for Native Americans. The Blackfeet reservation is roughly the size of Delaware but had only two election offices and four ballot drop-off locations last year, one of which was listed as open for just 14 hours over two days. Many other reservations in Montana have no polling places, meaning residents must go to the county seat to vote, and many don’t have cars or can’t afford to take time off.

Advocacy groups like Western Native Voice have become central to get-out-the-vote efforts, to the point that the Blackfeet government’s website directs voters who need help not to a tribal office but to W.N.V.

Ms. LaPlant, who was one of about a dozen Western Native Voice organizers on the Blackfeet reservation last year, said she couldn’t begin to estimate how far they had collectively driven. One organizer alone logged 700 miles.

One of the voters the team helped was Heidi Bull Calf, whose 19-year-old son has a congenital heart defect. Knowing the danger he would be in if he got Covid-19, she and her family barely left their home in Browning for a year.

Asked whether there was any way she could have returned her ballot on her own without putting her son’s health at risk, Ms. Bull Calf, the director of after-school programs at an elementary school, said no.

The ballot collection law says that “for the purposes of enhancing election security, a person may not provide or offer to provide, and a person may not accept, a pecuniary benefit in exchange for distributing, ordering, requesting, collecting or delivering ballots.” Government entities, election administrators, mail carriers and a few others are exempt, but advocacy groups aren’t. Violators will be fined $100 per ballot.

In May, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Native American Rights Fund sued the Montana secretary of state, Christi Jacobsen, a Republican, over the new laws. The lawsuit alleges that the ballot collection limits and the elimination of same-day voter registration violate the Montana Constitution and are “part of a broader scheme” to disenfranchise Native voters. It was filed in a state district court that struck down a farther-reaching ballot collection ban as discriminatory last year.

A spokesman for Ms. Jacobsen did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Ms. Jacobsen said, “The voters of Montana spoke when they elected a secretary of state that promised improved election integrity with voter ID and voter registration deadlines, and we will work hard to defend those measures.”

The state-level legal process may be Native Americans’ only realistic recourse now, because on Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld a ballot collection law in Arizona, signaling that federal challenges to voting restrictions based on disparate impact on voters of color were unlikely to succeed.

Voting difficulties are acute not just for the Blackfeet but also for Montana’s seven other federally recognized tribes: the Crow and Northern Cheyenne, based on reservations of the same names; the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation; the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre of the Fort Belknap Reservation; the Assiniboine and Sioux of the Fort Peck Reservation; the Chippewa Cree of Rocky Boy’s Reservation; and the Little Shell Chippewa in Great Falls.

On the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations, many residents have no internet. Often, the only way to register to vote is in person at election offices in Hardin and Forsyth, 60 miles or more one way from parts of the reservations.

The Battle Over Voting Rights

After former President Donald J. Trump returned in recent months to making false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, Republican lawmakers in many states have marched ahead to pass laws making it harder to vote and change how elections are run, frustrating Democrats and even some election officials in their own party.

    • A Key Topic: The rules and procedures of elections have become central issues in American politics. As of May 14, lawmakers had passed 22 new laws in 14 states to make the process of voting more difficult, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute.
    • The Basic Measures: The restrictions vary by state but can include limiting the use of ballot drop boxes, adding identification requirements for voters requesting absentee ballots, and doing away with local laws that allow automatic registration for absentee voting.
    • More Extreme Measures: Some measures go beyond altering how one votes, including tweaking Electoral College and judicial election rules, clamping down on citizen-led ballot initiatives, and outlawing private donations that provide resources for administering elections.
    • Pushback: This Republican effort has led Democrats in Congress to find a way to pass federal voting laws. A sweeping voting rights bill passed the House in March, but faces difficult obstacles in the Senate, including from Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia. Republicans have remained united against the proposal and even if the bill became law, it would most likely face steep legal challenges.
    • Florida: Measures here include limiting the use of drop boxes, adding more identification requirements for absentee ballots, requiring voters to request an absentee ballot for each election, limiting who could collect and drop off ballots, and further empowering partisan observers during the ballot-counting process.
    • Texas: Texas Democrats successfully blocked the state’s expansive voting bill, known as S.B. 7, in a late-night walkout and are starting a major statewide registration program focused on racially diverse communities. But Republicans in the state have pledged to return in a special session and pass a similar voting bill. S.B. 7 included new restrictions on absentee voting; granted broad new autonomy and authority to partisan poll watchers; escalated punishments for mistakes or offenses by election officials; and banned both drive-through voting and 24-hour voting.
    • Other States: Arizona’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed a bill that would limit the distribution of mail ballots. The bill, which includes removing voters from the state’s Permanent Early Voting List if they do not cast a ballot at least once every two years, may be only the first in a series of voting restrictions to be enacted there. Georgia Republicans in March enacted far-reaching new voting laws that limit ballot drop-boxes and make the distribution of water within certain boundaries of a polling station a misdemeanor. And Iowa has imposed new limits, including reducing the period for early voting and in-person voting hours on Election Day.

This made same-day voter registration a popular option for people who could make the trip only once. But under a new law, H.B. 176, the registration deadline is noon on the day before the election.

Keaton Sunchild, the political director at Western Native Voice, said that last year, hundreds of Native Americans had registered to vote after that time.

Lauri Kindness, a Western Native Voice organizer on the Crow Reservation, where she was born and lives, said: “There are many barriers and hardships in our communities with basic things like transportation. From my community, the majority of our voters were able to gain access to the ballot through same-day voter registration.”

State Representative Sharon Greef, the Republican who sponsored H.B. 176, said its purpose was to shorten lines and reduce the burden on county clerks and recorders by enabling them to spend Election Day focusing only on ballots, without also processing registrations. She said that if people voted early, they could still register and cast their ballot in one trip.

“I tried to think of any way this could affect all voters, not only the Native Americans, and if I had felt this in any way would have disenfranchised any voter, discouraged any voter from getting to the polls, I couldn’t in good conscience have carried the bill,” Ms. Greef said. “Voting is a right that we all have, but it’s a right that we can’t take lightly, and we have to plan ahead for it.”

At a community organizing training in Bozeman in early June, Western Native Voice leaders framed voting rights within the broader context of self-determination and political representation for Native Americans.

With the State Legislature adjourned for the year and the lawsuit in the hands of lawyers, organizers are turning their focus to redistricting.

Montana will get a second House seat as a result of the 2020 census, and Native Americans want to maximize their influence in electing members of Congress. But arguably more important are the maps that will be drawn for the State Legislature, which could give Native Americans greater power to elect the representatives who make Montana’s voting laws.

Redistricting will be handled by a commission consisting of two Republicans, two Democrats and a nonpartisan presiding officer chosen by the Montana Supreme Court: Maylinn Smith, a former tribal judge and tribal law professor who is herself Native American.

Ta’jin Perez, deputy director of Western Native Voice, urged the group’s organizers to map out communities with common interests in and around their reservations, down to the street level. W.N.V. would send that data to the Native American Rights Fund, which would use it to inform redistricting suggestions.

“You can either define it yourself,” Mr. Perez warned, “or the folks in Helena will do it for you.”

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Business

CNN Drops Rick Santorum After Dismissive Feedback About Native People

CNN Drops Rick Santorum After Dismissive Comments About Native Americans

Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator and Republican presidential candidate, has been dropped from his role as a CNN political commentator amid controversy over recent remarks in which he seemed to erase the role of Native Americans in U.S. history.

Matt Dornic, head of strategic communications at CNN, confirmed in an email on Saturday that the network had “parted ways” with the former senator.

Mr. Santorum’s departure from CNN came after comments he made about Native Americans at a Young America’s Foundation event last month.

“We birthed a nation from nothing — I mean, there was nothing here,” Mr. Santorum said at the event. “I mean, yes, we have Native Americans, but candidly, there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”

Days after the event, Mr. Santorum walked back his comments on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time.”

“I misspoke,” Mr. Santorum told the program’s host, Chris Cuomo. “I was talking about the founding of our country. I had given a long talk about the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the ideas behind those, and that I was saying we sort of created that anew, if you will. And I was not trying to dismiss Native Americans.”

In a statement on Saturday, Mr. Santorum said: “When I signed on with CNN, I understood that I would be providing commentary that is not regularly heard by the typical CNN viewer. I greatly appreciate the opportunity CNN provided me over the past four years and I am committed to continuing the fight for our conservative principles and values.”

After Mr. Santorum’s comments were made public, many called for him to be dropped from the network, including Fawn R. Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians.

“It wasn’t a matter of if, but when,” Ms. Sharp said on Twitter on Saturday after Mr. Santorum’s departure from CNN was reported. “Justice is served.”

The National Congress of American Indians did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Before Mr. Santorum’s departure, Ms. Sharp said in a letter dated April 26 that any media organization should fire him or face a boycott from more than 500 tribal nations.

“Rick Santorum is an unhinged and embarrassing racist who disgraces CNN and any other media company that provides him a platform,” Ms. Sharp wrote in the letter. “Do you stand with white supremacists justifying Native American genocide, or do you stand with Native Americans?”

After Mr. Santorum’s comments in April, the Native American Journalists Association also called on CNN to dismiss the former senator and urged its members to avoid working with the network.

“With a lack of accountability or ethics around multiple racist and insensitive comments from CNN staff, the Native American Journalists Association urges its members to avoid working with the network to avoid harassment and racism,” the association said in a statement. “NAJA also calls on advertisers, funders and journalism diversity organizations to withdraw their support from CNN indefinitely.”

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Business

A Push to Transfer the Golf Course Atop a Native American ‘Stonehenge’

A Push to Move the Golf Course Atop a Native American ‘Stonehenge’

NEWARK, Ohio – The third hole here at Moundbuilders Country Club is a tricky par four: the green is protected by a six foot hill that almost completely surrounds the hole and requires a skillful chip shot to clarify if your approach shot goes wrong .

“It’s a blind shot,” said Randol Mitchell, the club’s chief golfer, after driving his ball a good portion of the length of the hole. “You have to watch out for these hills.”

The course’s topography is based on the hills prescribed by Native American cosmology, which they created about 2,000 years ago to measure the movement of the sun and moon through the sky.

But now the club, which has leased the land for more than a century, is being asked to move so that the hills can be considered an archaeological treasure that they say it will be difficult for them to do if not representatives of the State increase the stake in the cost of building a new golf course.

The amount of $ 1.7 million proposed by state officials under significant conditions emerges from an initial offer of $ 800,000. But the club wants $ 12 million. The dispute goes to the Ohio Supreme Court on Tuesday.

The historical significance of the site is clear. The US Department of the Interior has already selected the country for nomination as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This is part of a larger offering to recognize some similar sites in Ohio known as the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.

Many of the golfers say they appreciate this meaning as well, even after nicknamed an eight-foot-high hill, the “Big Chief”. The club has a scrapbook that records the history of the earthworks known as Octagon Earthworks up until they were made. The clubhouse has a painting and photographs of the hills. Golfers are only allowed to drive carts over them on paved paths.

However, if you come across a ball perched on top of the ancient earthworks, there is no prohibition on hitting it with a 3 iron.

“Water, forest and sand pose natural challenges on many golf courses,” said David Kratoville, president of the club’s board of trustees. “It’s the hills here.”

There were once hundreds of significant earthworks built by people of the Hopewell culture. This refers to the Native American mound assemblies dating from about 100 BC. Lived in North America until 500 AD. However, their value has only been recognized in recent years, and many have been destroyed.

The hills on the golf course were created with sharp sticks and folding hooks for a basket of earth each and are part of the wider Newark Earthworks. They are widely regarded as an astronomical and geometric marvel.

If you stand on the hill of the observatory of the square every 18.6 years and look up the line of parallel hills towards the octagonal area, something spectacular happens. When the rising moon reaches its northernmost position, it will hover within half a degree of the exact center of the octagon. The alignments are no less sophisticated than the arranged stones in Stonehenge, experts say.

Members of the Hopewell culture likely intended the earthworks, which can only be fully appreciated from above, to show their moon and sun gods that they understood their movements, said Ray Hively, professor emeritus of astronomy and physics at Earlham College in Richmond “Indiana The effort may have been an attempt to connect or communicate with the forces that appeared to control the larger universe,” said Hively, who discovered these alignments with a philosophy professor, Robert Horn, in the 1980s.

In 1892, Licking County and the city of Newark, about 40 miles east of Columbus, allowed the state to use the land as a camp for the Ohio National Guard. After the camp closed it was reclaimed and leased to the club in 1910. A well-known golf architect, Thomas Bendelow, who designed America’s first public 18-hole golf course, Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, laid out a course to match. By 1911, the old moon markings had turned into faulty shooting targets.

“The old moundbuilders unwittingly left the backdrop for a golf course as strange and athletic as never before,” proclaimed an article about the course in the January 1930 issue of Golf Illustrated.

The course itself, with a slope rating of 119, is moderately difficult, although no one would ever mistake it for Jack Nicklaus’ Muirfield Village Golf Club (slope 130) which is 40 miles to the west. Mitchell said the hills are a bigger obstacle than they appear at first glance.

“It’s hard to shoot what you normally shoot here,” he said. “Even if it shouldn’t be that difficult on paper.”

Efforts to fully recognize the importance of the hills as more than uncommon golf hazards go back about two decades when an offer to build a new clubhouse with the foundations dug into the hills was turned down. At that point, a group led by local professors and Native Americans was organizing a protest campaign – and some local residents wondered if the course should even exist.

Then as now, the unwillingness of the club to give way to the worldwide recognition of the website has been criticized.

“We don’t want a country club on the Acropolis,” said John N. Low, a citizen of the Potawatomi Pokagon Band and director of the Newark Earthworks Center, in a recent interview. “We don’t want a country club in the Octagon.”

Club members have long argued that the criticism is unfair, that the delay is caused by an unwillingness to respect, that the club also has some history, and that, in response to the amounts offered to give up its lease, could not continue to exist.

“Everyone would love to portray us as high-fat cats,” Ralph Burpee, the club’s former general manager, told the New York Times in 2005. “Well, this is Newark, Ohio, which pretty much rules out high-fat cats.”

Kratoville described the current approximately 300 members of the club as a “blue collar country club”.

“Our members are people like plumbers,” he said, “and they come out for a day and clean up sand traps and plant flowers.”

The property is now owned by the Ohio History Connection, a statewide nonprofit that has signed a contract with the state to monitor more than 50 historic sites. The nonprofit has leased the property to the club since it was acquired in 1933 and hosts four open days at the club each year that included tours of the hills before the pandemic. The property is also open to the public for golf on Mondays or in bad weather. For the rest of the year, visitors have to view the hills from an elevated platform near the parking lot.

The History Connection aims to turn the site into a public park and submit it for recognition as a World Heritage Site, as a site of “Outstanding Value for Humanity,” along with others such as the Taj Mahal and the Grand Canyon.

“We are committed on behalf of Ohio taxpayers to responsibly protecting and interpreting the historic value of the site,” said Burt Logan, executive director and chief executive of History Connection. “And we hope that we will finally be able to do that soon.”

However, without unrestricted public access to the site, federal officials have stated that nomination as a World Heritage Site would be impossible.

The Moundbuilders lease runs until 2078. And although Kratoville said the club was ready to move, the History Connection and the club were millions of dollars apart. In 2018, the History Connection sued the club in court for the lease of a major domain.

Two lower courts ruled in History Connection’s favor, and it is now up to the Ohio Supreme Court to see if the nonprofit has the right to buy out the remainder of the lease. The History Connection, formerly known as the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, last used a significant domain about a century ago to purchase several acres of earthwork 100 miles south of the Octagon property.

The Country Club argues that the History Connection did not negotiate in “good faith” what is required prior to a takeover under significant conditions, and that the public purpose – an expanded program of research, educational services, and preservation – could be achieved without the lease a great employer.

Zachary J. Murry, an Ohio attorney who specializes in major domain cases, said the court may not be ready to take on the role of deciding which of the competing public ends is better, given that political decisions tend to be the rule be hit by other branches of government.

If the court were to take on that role, one question, he said, would be whether operating as a public park and the prospect of becoming a globally recognized wonder is sufficient rationale to justify the takeover now, if recognition has not yet come is granted.

“This ‘conditional’ need seems problematic,” he said.

If the club moves, Kratoville said he wasn’t sure the Moundbuilders Country Club would keep its name. But it certainly wouldn’t try to recreate the hills, he said.

“You can’t do that,” he said. “It would be a different course.”

The only job of the Supreme Court is to rule on the important domain issue. If the History Connection turns out to have the right to take over the lease, the compensation will be handed down in a lower court at a later date – an amount Murry said would ultimately likely be somewhere between the two ratings.

Glenna Wallace, the first chief of Oklahoma’s Eastern Shawnee Tribe to consider the mound builders her ancestors, said the dispute was beyond monetary value. World heritage recognition for the earthworks – and full public access – would play a vital role in transforming the way visitors think about Indians, she said.

“The sophistication it takes to create this shows that my ancestors weren’t savages,” she said. “This must be open to people every single day of the week and every single day of the year.”