With all of the elections coming up in the United States, it seems everyone is talking about how important it is to go out and vote. They would be right. Voting as an American is a civic duty that everyone should take part in.
Unfortunately, North Dakota has decided that the people who were here before anyone else do not deserve the right to vote. Native Americans in North Dakota are being specifically targeted in order to prevent their vote during a crucial election that they could sway significantly.
The Supreme Court has just put into effect a new law that a voter cannot vote unless they have identification with their name, birth date and residential address. Many Native Americans who live on reservations have P.O. boxes rather than residential addresses.
A P.O. box has been deemed insufficient for this, and therefore many Native Americans will be turned away from the polls in November. This is significant because North Dakota does not require voter registration, and instead, one could just show up to vote on Election Day with an ID. State officials say that because of this, the new law is required to prevent voter fraud.
Additionally, this election in North Dakota is particularly important because Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp is competing in a fierce re-election race where she is already behind in the polls. In 2012, Native Americans were a contributing factor in her election.
North Dakota was a state that Donald Trump won by 36 points, which does not bode well for Heitkamp. If she loses, the chances of Democrats taking back the Senate will be even smaller, and this election is a battle for the Democrats to take back the House and Senate.
The hope is that if Democrats gain the majority again, President Trump will not be able to pass the detrimental legislation he has been trying to pass, such as his plan to get rid of Obamacare or make more tax breaks for the rich.
Disenfranchising Native Americans, a group that votes predominantly Democrat, would be detrimental to this election. Not only that, but it is extremely unjust and racist to target them as a group and make their votership invalid.
Native Americans do not have residential addresses because they live on reservations, and they live on reservations because we stuck them there after we finished murdering a majority of their population and stealing their land.
Republicans are so worried about illegal immigrants coming to America, when we are the original illegal immigrants who took everything from the Natives of this land, and we continue to harm them at every turn.
Just look at last year and the Dakota Access Pipeline. We tried to dig through their sacred grounds to ruin it with oil spills and permanent pollution. Now we are trying to take away their ability to remove the people from office who continue to step on them and what little land they have left.
A simple solution would be for North Dakota to use voter registration like most other states so they do not have to worry about voter fraud and make up ridiculous solutions that blatantly target a demographic.
Of course, Republicans would rather continue the centuries of harm done to Native Americans in order to ensure their control of the House and Senate. It is supposed to be a guaranteed right of every American citizen to be able to vote. They were living on this land centuries before any European came over.
We should be doing even more for Native Americans. We should be helping them and trying to make up for the genocide that we caused, not disenfranchising them. I am truly disgusted with the way America treats the people of this land who were here first.
