Biden administration calls for steps to increase Native American voter turnout

The Biden administration on Thursday announced recommendations for agencies and local governments to adopt in order to increase the amount of Native Americans who vote in elections.

The recommendations include directing the U.S. Postal Service to evaluate whether it can add routes, offices and staff hours to serve Native communities, directing jurisdictions serving Native voters to ensure they can offer effective language assistance, and ensuring that county and municipal election officials locate offices and polling places serving Native communities conveniently.

Senior administration officials added that the administration is calling on states to pass the Native American Voting Rights Act, which aims to ensure equal access to voting for Native Americans, and not wait for Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the Democrat’s voting rights legislation that has stalled in Congress.

“There are challenges throughout the voting process and some of those are from background conditions that Native Americans find themselves in— things like high poverty rates, high rates of disability, travel distances on many tribal lands,” an official said. “Some of them are difficulties specific to individual pieces of the voting process, but we heard about challenges at every stage.”

Biden signed an executive order a year ago on promoting access to voting, which directed an all-of-government effort to promote information about the voting process and to further the ability of all eligible Americans to vote.

The recommendations released on Thursday stem from the Interagency Steering Group on Native American Voting Rights, which the executive order created with the mission is to study the barriers Native voters face and to recommend steps to mitigate or eliminate these barriers.

The official said that challenges to Native American voters include getting information to people in languages they speak, restricted information due to broadband challenges, challenges in voter registration, challenges to redistricting, and challenges voting in person as well as access to voting by mail.

Over eight million Native Americans are of voting age but in the 2020 election, voter turnout in Native American populations was 13 percent lower than the national average and 17 percentage lower than white non-Hispanic voter average, according to Census figures.

In Arizona, outside of the two major metropolitan areas, only 18 percent of Native American voters have home mail delivery, officials noted.

“It’s going to take a whole of society effort to correct that situation,” an official said. 

The administration released a full report on Thursday that chronicles the recommendations and the Department of the Interior is translating it into six Native languages, including Navajo, Yup’ik, Ojibwe, Cherokee, Lakota, and Native Hawaiian.