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CAN NATIVE VOTERS CARRY MONTANA?  
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Joseph Bullington
October 29, 2024
In These Times
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_ From Billings to Fort Peck, organizers are working to register
Indigenous voters—and believe they might shift the needle. _

Organizers with Western Native Voice started a push in June to help
Montana’s Native communities overcome obstacles to voter
registration, such as atypical addresses. , Courtesy of Western Native
Voice

 

FORT PECK, MONT. — If you live in the rural reaches of the Fort
Peck Indian Reservation, casting a ballot is no simple matter.

This country along the Hi-Line of northeastern Montana, home to
several bands of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes, gives new meaning
to the word remote. Town might be an hour’s drive, houses are few
and far between, polling places are fewer and farther.

Many of the roads are dirt. A rainstorm or snowmelt turns many of
them into impassable gumbo.

If the roads are dry and you can afford the gas on Election Day, you
might arrive at your polling place to find you’ve been cut from the
voter rolls. You can still vote, but to register late you have to go
to the county election office in Wolf Point, which could be another
45 miles or more from your polling place. You worry that the clerks
there might turn you away because, like many people on the
reservation, you don’t have an official address.

At some point, you might say to hell with it and just go home.

Fort Peck is the second-largest of Montana’s seven reservations, but
the obstacles Native voters face here aren’t unique. Turnout in
reservation counties often lags behind the statewide average, and
it’s fallen drastically in recent election cycles. In the 2020
general election, for example, turnout in Big Horn County (which
contains most of the Crow Reservation) trailed the state average by 16
points. That could have wide-ranging repercussions. In Montana, low
reservation turnout could hurt Native political representation in the
state. Nationally, the difference here could be the difference in
a Senate race — between Democrat Jon Tester and Republican Tim
Sheehy — that could determine whether Democrats hold onto
the Senate.

Montana’s politics have taken a hard right turn in recent years,
driven in part by an influx of wealthy, right-wing newcomers.
Republicans have won a two-thirds majority in the state legislature
and pushed Democrats out of all statewide offices, save
one — the Senate seat held by Jon Tester for three terms.
Tester, a farmer from the remote prairie town of Big Sandy, won
reelection in 2018 by only 18,000 votes. Polls show him trailing
Sheehy, a Navy SEAL and millionaire business owner who moved to
Montana 10 years ago.

For comparison, some 60,000 eligible Native voters live in Montana,
and they tend to vote heavily Democratic. On voting maps, the
reservations are islands of blue in the red of rural districts. So the
question is turnout, and a close race could come down to how many
Native voters are able to vote.

The stakes are high, both for Democrats and for Native communities,
says Sharon Stewart-Peregoy. A Crow tribal member, Stewart-Peregoy is
a Democratic representative in the state legislature and is running
for a state Senate seat in a district that encompasses the Crow and
Northern Cheyenne reservations.

“Under Republican leadership here in Montana,” Stewart-Peregoy
says, ​“we have suffered, my constituents have suffered.” She
worries sending Sheehy to the U.S. Senate would only make
things worse.

In audio clips
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published by Char-Koosta News in August, Sheehy can be heard at
campaign fundraising events making racist comments about drunk
Indians. Sheehy has so far refused to apologize.

Stewart-Peregoy puts it this way: ​“I wouldn’t want to be
represented by a racist bigot who’s not going to respect
our interests.”

Neither Sheehy nor the Montana GOP responded to requests for comment.

For Sami Walking Bear, a member of the Crow Tribe and the outreach
and field director for the nonpartisan organization Western Native
Voice
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the campaign to overcome obstacles to Native voting begins long before
Election Day.

Between the 2020 and 2024 primaries, most Montana counties added
registered voters — except, nearly all counties that contain
reservations cut voters from their rolls, often in large numbers.
Roosevelt County, which contains most of Fort Peck, cut 257, or 4.5%,
of its voters. Glacier County, which contains most of the Blackfeet
Reservation, cut 221, or 2.7%, of its voters. Many of these voters may
not realize they’re no longer registered, says Walking Bear, which
creates obstacles they’re unlikely to overcome on Election Day.
Western Native Voice has teams of locals on the ground, on every
reservation and in Great Falls and Billings, working against the clock
to register voters before late registration begins. But registering
reservation voters has its own obstacles.

Walking Bear says that, when the group began this campaign, many
counties didn’t want to accept ​“unconventional” addresses on
the registration forms. ​“On the reservation, we often don’t
have addresses,” she says. Instead, her field teams help people fill
out the forms using ​“descriptive addresses,” which could be GPS
coordinates or something like ​“3.5 miles northwest onGrapevine
Road, first orange house on the right.” Those addresses satisfy the
legal requirements, Walking Bear says, but convincing county election
clerks has been a job in itself.

Besides the structural obstacles, Walking Bear says many Native people
have ambivalent feelings about voting: ​“To go vote in a country
that has shown little interest in Natives, it’s hard to get on that
bandwagon.” But she sees voting as a means to build Native
political power and win seats at the table. ​“I tell people:
​‘If our votes aren’t important, why do they make it so hard for
us to register and vote?’”

This year, Walking Bear’s field teams aren’t the only ones trying
to turn out the Native vote. In March, the Montana Democratic Party
announced a seven-figure voter outreach campaign in Indian Country,
hiring organizers and setting up field offices across the state.

Organizers for both the Montana Democratic Party and nonpartisan
Western Native Voice hope the resources they’re pouring into Native
communities will be enough to help Native voters overcome those
obstacles — obstacles that voting rights advocates say
shouldn’t exist. After Native voters and the American Civil
Liberties Union sued the state over voting access in 2013, the Montana
secretary of state issued a directive that requires counties to
establish satellite election offices on qualifying reservations, where
people could cast early ballots and register late without having to
drive long distances. As this story went to press, a lawsuit
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is pending from Fort Peck tribal members against Roosevelt and Valley
counties and the Montana secretary of state, arguing the two counties
should have established satellite offices but didn’t.

Representatives for both counties declined to comment on pending
litigation, though Roosevelt County Attorney Theresa Diekhans said the
county is ​“committed to a fair, open and accessible election for
all its citizens.”

The plaintiffs say in the lawsuit that not establishing these
satellite offices will make it ​“harder, if not impossible,” for
tribal members to exercise their right to vote — reinforcing
​“the long history of official racial discrimination in voting
practiced in the State of Montana.”

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Joseph Bullington [[link removed]]
grew up in the Smith River watershed near White Sulphur Springs,
Montana. He is the editor of Rural America In These Times.

* Fort Peck Indian Reservation; Voting Rights; Montana Politics;
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