Chances are you’ve probably never heard of an “addressing coordinator,” though the work these local government employees perform literally shapes communities.
This is because they’re responsible for verifying and enforcing addresses, creating new locations on maps, and tracking changes to roads and road names, among other essential tasks. As the Navajo Nation’s rural addressing/geographic information systems (GIS) coordinator, MC Baldwin has his work cut out for him.
For more than 24 years, a major component of Baldwin’s job has been to help people obtain coordinates to map the locations of their homes—a difficult task, given that many homes in the Navajo Nation lack a “backbone,” according to the coordinator.
“We have a lot of roads of Navajo Nation that do not have official names, and we have a lot of roads and streets that are paved, but we have probably four times the amount of paved roads that are not paved,” Baldwin said. “And when a road out in the rural area [is] not paved, then about 80% of the time it will not have a road name.”
A home needs to be located on a street with an official name to have a physical address. This, too, is more difficult than it should be. Part of the problem, Baldwin said, is a need for more care and concern for the people in the area, which translates to a lack of financial resources and too few employees to get people the addresses they need in a timely manner.
The effect of this neglect has significant consequences for residents in rural areas—including during presidential elections.
“The outside world, including mainly the Republicans, they are aware of our challenges, but they don’t consider us,” Baldwin said. “[T]hey kind of use this tool as vote suppression.”
Baldwin’s office provides locals with proof of residency for voter registration, but it can be a cumbersome process that creates another barrier to voting. If someone lives in a rural area without a street name, Baldwin must get the coordinates for their house and then find two of the nearest official roads on the map. If he can find at least two such roads, he measures the distance from the intersection of the two center lines to the location of the person’s house.
“That way, we can say the house is located 2.75 miles northeast of road 2715 and county road 327 junction on Navajo Nation,” Baldwin explained.
Google Plus Codes are also increasingly used in the Navajo Nation. These codes are made up of numbers and letters based on latitude and longitude, and they can act as addresses for places that don’t have one. With a Plus Code, rural residents can receive deliveries and ensure that emergency responders and social services can find them.
Plus Codes made their way to the Navajo Nation in large part thanks to the Rural Utah Project (RUP) led by addressing specialist Daylene Redhorse.
In 2018, Redhorse conducted a voter registration drive that, in part, included checking whether voters were registered to vote in the correct precincts. While carrying out this work, she realized that her own precinct was incorrect and that she’d been voting in the wrong precinct. Many others in the region experienced similar issues, she said.
This realization led Redhorse to begin working with Google developers in 2019. To ensure residents were informed of their home’s Plus Code address, Redhorse went door-to-door and in many cases, traveled to the most remote parts of Utah’s Navajo Nation. The process of actually finding the Plus Code for each house was also tedious.
“So let’s say you’re looking at a map, you’re looking at a house, you’re going to zoom to it further, and then you’re going to zoom in really close, drop a pin in the center of the roof, whatever that center or that pin, that grid that it’s sitting in, that number is what would they use, that’s going to be your Plus Code,” Redhorse explained.
Within the first year of Redhorse’s efforts, 1,600 people registered as new voters. Redhorse also made sure to re-register people with their Plus Codes if they were unsure of their registration status or voting precinct. The team finished the project late last year, identifying 5,500 addressable structures—just in time for this year’s presidential election.
Baldwin and Redhorse’s efforts speak to a much larger problem: Many Native Americans—especially those living on rural reservations—do not have a traditional street address. In fact, sometimes they have multiple addresses: A 911 address, a utility address, and the address they give themselves, all of which are different. The lack of standard street addresses poses a major challenge when registering to vote or voting by mail.
Making matters worse, many Native American reservations also do not have full U.S. Postal Service (USPS) coverage, meaning that they are not able to receive mail directly to their homes. Voter registration, election-day voting, and vote-by-mail are nearly impossible for those lacking a residential address or access to home mail delivery, and nonexistent or unreliable mail service disrupts the delivery of timely registration forms and ballots. When combined, these systemic barriers disenfranchise Native American voters and suppress their political participation—especially in states that rely heavily on vote-by-mail.
Suppressing Native voters
Voter registration forms overwhelmingly rely on standard residential addresses, which creates a challenge for many Native Americans living on reservations. According to Ronnie Jo Horse, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota and a descendant of the Northern Cheyenne Nation in Montana, these communities often use P.O. boxes or descriptive direction. Horse is currently the executive director of Western Native Voice, a Native American leadership and advocacy organization that serves 12 Tribal Nations in Montana.
“Descriptive direction” is exactly how it sounds, according to Horse. Instead of an address, it’s a series of directions like, “You go a mile down river road, and I live in the last white house on the right.” Allison Neswood, a Navajo attorney working with the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), told Prism that voter registration forms with descriptive addresses are disproportionately rejected.
The Census Bureau uses several methods to count the U.S. population, including Type of Enumeration Area, a classification identifying how the agency obtained addresses for each census collection block. There are five different types of enumeration areas, including the category “Update Leave,” which requires a personal visit to the households to drop off a
Census questionnaire for the respondent to complete and mail back. This category is more common in rural areas, though it accounts for only 4.52% of housing units in the country that “either do not have mail delivered to the physical location of the housing unit, or the mail delivery information for the housing unit cannot be verified.”
A recent NARF study found a strong correlation between Native American addresses, especially on reservations, and Update Leave addresses. In Arizona, for example, a recent study found that residents off-reservation are 105 times more likely to have a standard address than residents on reservation.
The study also found this correlation to be true even for off-reservation areas that were heavily Native American.
If people do not receive mail at their house, especially on reservations, they often must travel significant distances to participate in the electoral process. Some Navajo Nation members travel 140 miles round trip to access postal services. Some precincts do not allow P.O. boxes or shared boxes for voter registration, and it’s also worth noting that P.O. boxes can be costly.
“In the community that I lived in, it was very limited in the hours that the post office was actually open,” Horse noted.
Native Americans have a 26.6% poverty rate, nearly double the national rate. On reservations and in Alaska Native villages, the poverty rate is 38.3%. Mailing a ballot on a reservation requires gas money, time, and access to a vehicle. Over 90% of reservations also lack broadband access, making it difficult for Native American voters to register online.
“So it really is this sort of layered situation, where all of these barriers add up,” Neswood said.
Native voters play a pivotal role
Some states have tried to implement laws to further disenfranchise Native voters.
In Montana, HB 176 ended Election Day voter registration, which reservation voters have disproportionately relied on to cast votes in Montana. HB 530 also blocked paid third-party ballot collection, another practice relied on heavily by Native Americans living on reservations. Horse referred to these laws as “voter suppression tactics” aimed at Native American communities.
This is why Western Native Voice and Montana Native Vote challenged these laws. The Montana Supreme Court ruled that these laws made it “much more difficult on average for people living on reservations to either get to a polling place on or before election day, or to mail an absentee ballot prior to election day.” However, earlier this year the state decided to review the Montana Supreme Court’s decision with the U.S. Supreme Court and the case is currently ongoing.
In 2022, Arizona House Bill 2492 required voters to provide a government-issued photo ID that contains or is paired with another document that shows their current physical address. Otherwise, a prospective voter must provide two documents that contain their current physical address. More than 40,000 homes on Native American reservations across the state do not have physical addresses, and the lack of access to postal delivery also means that most residents did not have many documents featuring their name and an address corresponding with the physical location of their home.
The law was challenged by the Tohono O’odham Nation and the Gila River Indian Community, and last year the U.S. District Court ruled in their favor, finding that the proof of address requirement in Arizona’s HB 2492 is preempted by the National Voter Registration Act. The court ruled that the bill’s address requirements must be liberally interpreted so that voters aren’t required to have a standard street address while also allowing numerous documents to satisfy the requirement, including an Arizona-issued ID listing a P.O. box or any Tribal identification document, regardless of whether it has an address. In September, however, the Supreme Court stopped the lower court’s ruling that blocked election officials from automatically rejecting state voter registration forms without documentary proof of citizenship.
While the court did reject part of the request that sought to block registered Arizona voters without proof of citizenship from voting in federal elections or by mail, this also meant that voters who registered to vote using state-created voter registration forms would still need documentation proving citizenship for the registration to be valid. If no proof is provided, the state could reject the registration without informing the resident. If the court were to have granted the request to block registered voters without proof of citizenship from voting in federal elections, it could have impacted thousands of Arizona voters in this year’s presidential election—despite all Indigenous peoples being declared citizens of the U.S. in 1924.
Arizona is a swing state and it’s expected to play a critical role in the 2024 election. Native voters have the potential to be a major deciding factor.
“There are way more Native American voters in states like Arizona and Wisconsin than there are votes that made up the margins in critical statewide elections,” Neswood said. “Even up to the presidential election in 2020, the number of voters exceeded the margin between the winner and the loser in those states, and those states are certainly in the mix as swing states again.”
From 1996 to 2020, Arizona was a Republican stronghold until President Joe Biden’s presidency. Native Americans played a pivotal role in flipping the state.
Voters in precincts on the Navajo and Hopi reservations in northeastern Arizona cast nearly 60,000 ballots in the 2020 election, 17,500 more than in 2016, according to an Associated Press analysis of election data. Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes. Compared with a 4% uptick among all Arizona voters, participation in two of the larger precincts on the reservations heightened by 12% and 13%, respectively, with Biden securing a significant lead in these areas.
According to Neswood, a great deal of work must be done to ensure Native American voters get the information and support they need and to make sure they are not denied the time and access at the polls. Neswood said that volunteers monitoring early voting in Montana recently found that one polling location opened an hour later than its scheduled time, requiring her team to negotiate an extra hour of voting time.
Much of the focus for groups like the Native American Rights Fund is empowering voters to perform tasks many take for granted, like filling out voter registration forms and informing these voters that they can describe the location of their home on the address line or draw a map that shows where their home is located. Of course, this also means that part of their work is holding county and other election workers accountable when they incorrectly reject this information.
To Neswood, the efforts to disenfranchise Native American voters are transparent: These voters “can really have an impact all the way up to the top of the ticket,” she said.
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