The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe slammed the Supreme Court’s decision allowing North Dakota to enforce a voter ID law.
The law requires voters to present identification that includes a current residential street address if they want to vote in this year’s midterm elections.
“Native Americans can live on the reservation without an address. They’ve lived in accordance with the law and treaties, but now all of a sudden they can’t vote. There is no good reason that a P.O. box is not sufficient to vote,” Standing Rock Chairman Mike Faith said in a press release.
{mosads}“Why is it getting harder and harder for Native Americans to vote? This law clearly discriminates against Native Americans in North Dakota. Our voices should be heard and they should be heard fairly at the polls just like all other Americans,” he added.
A district court temporarily blocked the North Dakota secretary of state from enforcing the new requirements during the primary elections. But the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked that court order last month, allowing the law to be put in place ahead of the general election.
The Supreme Court upheld the appeals court’s decision Tuesday.
“The risk of voter confusion appears severe here because the injunction against requiring residential-address identification was in force during the primary election and because the Secretary of State’s website announced for months the ID requirements as they existed under that injunction,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent.
“Reasonable voters may well assume that the IDs allowing them to vote in the primary election would remain valid in the general election,” she added.
North Dakota is hosting one of the country’s most widely watched Senate races, in which Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) is facing off against Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) to win a second term in the Senate.