Discussion: Lawsuit: North Dakota Making Voter ID Law More 'Chaotic' For Native Americans

Funny how the GOP blathers endlessly about “government intrusion into people’s lives” but is quite happy to place onerous burdens on those same people if it means preventing them from voting against the GOP.

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It’s the Kobayashi maru of voting. smh

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Bingo

I’d ask what the USPS uses for the address, as part of the 9/11 Patriot Act changes all RR addresses needed to convert to actual street addresses. I remember when I lived in NE some streets had 2 or 3 different names. Eventually the USPS settled on a name and everyone got a postcard that provided the street and house number, one part was signed and returned as official an change of address, the other was for the household records. I could see a court requiring the same consideration be applied to reservations. I also could see the court preventing any disenfranchise of voters until the USPS finished issuing the necessary information.

My aunt is a Native American in Wisconsin who was whisked away to Indian School as a girl. On top of everything, the school changed her name. So to renew her driver’s license she needed for Wisconsin’s voter ID, she needed:

_Birth certificate. Which she didn’t have, so had to track down baptismal records from a church her family never willingly attended.
_Marriage certificate to her first husband
_Divorce decree
_Marriage certificate to my uncle
_Indian school records documenting the name they assigned her, because of course it didn’t match the church papers.

Over $100 in fees and more than one overnight trip. This is the new poll tax.

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If the state says that an address that is submitted on the ID is not “correct” they must have the “correct” address on file to check against the one submitted. It seems that the simple solution is for the state to tell the voter what their “Correct” address is and then issue a new ID.

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That assumes that the state is interested in serving all its residents and ensuring they can excersize their constitutional rights.

ND has already shown, via the passage of this law, that they have no interest in doing any such thing

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There’s a silver lining to this republican scummy attempt to yet again disenfranchise blocs of voters: It’s proof positive that the GOP knows it’s outnumbered in the USA and the only way it can possibly win elections is to cheat, lie, steal and otherwise act just like republicans always do. The GOP is admitting by these desperate moves that it knows the Democrats have the numbers and should win damn near every statewide and national race. The solution to kicking the putrid scum to the curb is to get people registered to vote. The GOP represents “The 1%”, so that leaves about 99% for our side. Democrats should have a permanent majority in Congress…the numbers prove it.

The Nations are not always subject to the same rules as the rest of the country, so I am curious as to whether the USPS applied that rule to them. I suspect the North Dakota GOP knew this when they passed this law to disenfranchise The Nations.

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Sorry, that dog don’t hunt…

Back in the early 60s my uncle needed to go through very much the same process when he wanted to retire from the US Army. The Army accepted him without those records back in WWII but would not allow him to retire without. It was very common not to have those records back in the day when most births outside of the “big” city were home births. That meant church records and/or things like using the family Bible which commonly had pages reserved for such records. In my uncles case complicated even more after a fire destroyed records. Took over 3 years and many trips to Harrisburg before completed.

Let me add, this is not a dig at your comment, our native population has been discriminated over enough. It is just a comment about finding the proper documents is not something new. I have also recently read that the problem with home births is once again causing issues with records. I have read that some lawmakers don’t understand why laws about birth and other records need to be revised. Some just don’t believe that births take place anywhere but in a hospital.