Troubles at the ballot box: Tribal IDs often aren’t accepted

Five states have officially declared that tribal IDs won’t be accepted – Ohio, Florida, Texas, South Carolina and West Virginia. But elsewhere, Native voters were also reporting problems using their tribal IDs.

“We’ve been receiving what feels like thousands of calls right now from people wanting to know what ID they can or can’t use,” according to Ceridwen Cherry, legal director at VoteRiders, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization with the mission of ensuring all citizens can exercise their freedom to vote.

Alison Neswood, staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund and a citizen of the Navajo Nation, also reported receiving many similar calls to the organization’s Election Protection Hotline.

“This is one of the big issues we’ve been hearing about all day,” Neswood told ICT on Tuesday, Nov. 5. “Even folks who are fully within their rights to use tribal ID for registration and voting are getting rejected at the polls.”

Neswood said, for example, that several citizens of the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin were rejected at the polls. Wisconsin accepts photo IDs issued by tribes located in the state even if the ID is expired.

NARF’s Native Vote Election Protection Project has trained 170 volunteer law students and attorneys who are assigned to polling locations in New Mexico, Wisconsin, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana to help troubleshoot issues Native voters may experience.

The organization also operates a hotline where voters, poll watchers and election observers can call if they experience or observe any challenges to efforts to cast ballots. The number is 1-855-OUR-VOTE.

A member of ICT’s news staff was surprised to learn Tuesday that the state of Ohio would not accept a tribal enrollment card as proof of identity, even though it is a photo ID with the correct home address.

The Ohio Legislature in 2023 passed House Bill 458, a new voter ID law that was among the strictest in the country, according to Cherry. Since the 2020 election, 18 states have passed new or stricter ID laws. In many states, the 2024 election is the first time voters have encountered the new requirements, which has created a great deal of confusion, Cherry said.

Before 2012, there were almost no voter ID laws across the country.

“The requirement for voter ID has proliferated and vastly expanded in two waves, beginning in 2013 when the Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act and then in the 2021-2022 period,” Cherry said.

She described the new laws as extremely confusing and idiosyncratic.

“I may be one of the only people in the country whose fulltime job is to understand the intricacies of all these new voter ID laws and I still can’t give you a clear answer about the requirements of some states,” she said.

For instance, although the requirements in some states don’t provide a specific listing of acceptable ID, they describe a confusing array of requisites, such as requiring IDs that include photos, signatures, street addresses or those issued by federal or local government.

Some states accepting tribal IDs require they be unexpired, only from federally recognized tribes within that state and include address, signature and photo. Some tribal IDs don’t include addresses.

In many cases, voters whose IDs are questioned can use provisional ballots that are then sealed in an envelope until the board of elections determines eligibility. In many cases, however, if voters were refused because of lack of a photo ID, they have to bring an acceptable document to the board of elections office within a set period of time. In Ohio, that would be four days. There are exclusions for those who object to being photographed for religious purposes.

The process of delivering acceptable ID can be daunting for many voters, Cherry said.

“You’ve already made the effort to vote but now you need to figure out how and where to get acceptable ID which may require multiple trips to various issuing offices and then you have to get to the board of election offices during working hours,” she said.

The requirements can be tough for those with jobs, Cherry said.

“Many people are deterred from voting,” she said.

Going forward, some states will require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

“We’re going to see an absolute wave of these proof of citizen laws,” Cherry said.

It remains unclear which states would accept tribal ID as proof of citizenship.