Tribal leaders demand satellite voting offices
The Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council is pressing Secretary of State Linda McCulloch to establish satellite voting offices for Native Americans in 10 Montana counties.
A letter from the council is on its way to McCulloch, calling on her to “issue a directive to Montana counties that have American Indian Reservations within their boundaries telling the counties that they must establish satellite voting offices for in-person absentee voting and later voter registration on those Indian Reservations within their boundaries for the upcoming 2016 general election for the full 30 day late registration and absentee voting period, including election day.”
The letter lists locations for satellite offices in Montana as Lame Deer and Busby on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation; Crow Agency, Lodge Grass and Pryor on the Crow Reservation; Poplar and Frazer on the Fort Peck Reservation; Hays, Lodge Pole and Fort Belknap on the Fort Belknap Reservation; Browning and Heart Butte on the Blackfeet Reservation; and Pablo on the Flathead reservations.
“We want them there and that’s what we’re entitled to,” said Tom Rodgers, a tribal issues activist who worked on the Wandering Medicine lawsuit and the letter and the Jack Abramoff case whistleblower.
That includes 10 counties: Glacier, Pondera, Lake, Chouteau, Hill, Blaine, Valley, Roosevelt, Big Horn and Rosebud counties.
The council, based in Billings, includes tribal leaders from all Montana reservations, as well as from Wyoming and Idaho. Executive Director William Snell Jr. and Chairman Ivan Posey signed the letter on behalf of the tribes.
The letter stems from a 2012 lawsuit, when plaintiffs from the Crow, Northern Cheyenne and Fort Belknap Indian reservations sued McCulloch and the elections offices in Blaine, Rosebud and Big Horn counties, arguing Indians did not have the same voting opportunities.
“With the 2016 general election less than fourteen months away, we request you take timely action today to direct reservation counties in Montana to establish these satellite voting offices for in-person absentee voting and late voter registration,” the letter reads.
The letter argues that McCulloch has the authority to establish the offices, citing a March 2014 order in the lawsuit from Judge Donald Molloy of the U.S. District Court in Missoula. Molloy wrote: “The Secretary had, and has, the ability to issue a directive telling the counties that they must establish satellite voting offices for in-person absentee voting and late voter registration. If a directive had been issued, it would have been binding on election administrators and they would have had to take the directed action.”
McCulloch sees Molloy’s order in a more narrow sense, limited to the counties in the lawsuit and dependent on the terms of the settlement. In an interview this summer, she called it a “local control issue” and maintains that the county government has the power to open the satellite offices, not her.
Rodgers said the Wandering Medicine case was about “no client but justice and service to our native brothers and sisters. We sought more than anything to echo the words of Lyndon Baines Johnson in signing the Voting Rights Act on August 6,1965: ‘The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.’”
Reach Tribune Staff Writer Kristen Inbody at kinbody@greatfallstribune.com. Follow her on Twitter at @GFTrib_KInbody.