Two of every five eligible Native Americans not registered to vote

This week the National Congress of American Indians called the problem of access to voting a “civic emergency” requiring an immediate fix, reports Mark Trahant for the Daily Yonder. “Native people have remained one of the most disenfranchised group of voters in the United States,” said Jefferson Keel, president of NCAI, the nation’s oldest and most representative tribal advocacy organization. “Today as a result, two out of every five eligible American Indian and Alaska Native voters are not registered to vote, in 2008 over 1 million eligible Native voters were unregistered.”

One way Native Americans could be added to the voter rolls, argued Keel, is to have state-based public assistance agencies such as Indian Health Services clinics designated as registration agencies as allowed under the National Voter Registration Act. This basic idea has worked in other places where low-income voters register at public assistance agencies. When that law was applied, tens of thousands of new voters were added in North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, Ohio and Illinois.