Female hopeful upset in Navajo presidential vote

On Monday we reported the Navajo Nation appeared poised to elect its first woman president, but New Mexico state Sen. Lynda Lovejoy couldn't ride the campaign momentum to victory in Tuesday's election. "Based on results of the Aug. 3 primary, plus the fact that she was the first woman to reach the general election for president, the buzz was all around the candidacy of Lynda Lovejoy," Bill Donovan of the Navajo Times reports. In the end, current Navajo Vice President Ben Shelly won by over 3,000 votes -- 33,692 to 30,357 -- according to unofficial election results, Donovan writes. (Times photo by Donovan Quintero: Leila Help-Tulley, Earl Tulley, John Lovejoy and Lynda Lovejoy.)

Former Arizona state Sen. Ben Henderson said "the election hinged on one issue - tradition, referring to creation stories of a time in the distant past when Navajo women went to live on the other side of a river," Donovan writes. There the women tried to make a go of it but "in the end the women had no place to go so they had to ask for help from the men," Henderson said. "At that time, the women promised that they would never try to go ahead of the men again." Henderson said that traditional view was bestowed by tribe elders on their children and grandchildren. "People are listening to the medicine men and the traditionalists," he told Donovan. (Read more)

"In the last weeks of campaigning, both Mr. Shelly and his running mate, the tribal council delegate Rex Lee Jim, were among the officials ensnared in a criminal investigation by the Navajo Department of Justice over misuse of tribal discretionary funds," Mireya Navarro of The New York Times reports. Lovejoy, who is asking for a recount, downplayed the role of gender during the campaign. "It’s not written anywhere that a woman can’t be at the helm of the nation," she told The New York Times during the campaign. "I don’t think about it myself. Gender is not an issue to me." (Read more)