VHaller

By Gabriel Rivera

Strong turnout among Arizona’s Native American voters during the 2020 presidential election helped Joe Biden secure a key win in the battleground state and propel him to the White House.

Grassroots voter registration on reservations, facilitated by an infusion of funding from Democratic Party organizations, resulted in up to 13 percent increases in turnout in some voting precincts on reservations and tens of thousands of more votes from tribal communities statewide, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

The big question in Arizona political circles now is whether Native voters will match those numbers in the 2022 midterm elections, where their ballots will be pivotal to key races for secretary of state, governor, U.S. Senate and seats in the House and state legislature.

Early indications show replicating the 2020 turnout will be difficult.

Diminished voter outreach to tribal communities and more than 50 Republican-backed bills in the state legislature designed to restrict access to ballots and polls threatens to jeopardize the progress made in mobilizing the voter bloc two years ago.

“More people had the opportunity to vote the way it was set up (in 2020), and I don’t know, in the next election, if we’re going to go back to the way it was,” said Martin Harvier, president of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, just east of Phoenix. “But every year, in our state legislature, there’s always things that are being introduced, and it seems like it’s always a detriment to the tribal communities, almost preventing people to vote, whether it’s an ID or your physical address that’s needed.”

Since elections fall under state jurisdiction, voter accessibility among Native Americans is largely determined by the willingness of the state to work with tribal communities.

Arizona has a decades-long history of suppressing the Native vote, subjecting tribal members to literacy tests and poll taxes. Now, Arizona is disenfranchising tribal communities through legislation disguised as election security.

A law passed earlier this year requires all Arizona voters to prove their citizenship to cast a ballot in federal elections and newly registered voters to provide proof of address. The latter provision threatens rural parts of tribal communities, where residents often have a P.O. box instead of a permanent address.

An artifact of Arizona’s ongoing history of voter suppression is its decentralized election system, which entrusts individual counties with implementing a variety of election policies. The result is that policies relating to things like polling locations, drop boxes and whether a vote will be discarded because the person voted at the wrong polling place vary from county to county in Arizona.

Half of all reservations in Arizona are bisected or trisected by county lines, forcing some members of the same tribe to follow different county election policies, confounding the process of voter registration and casting a ballot.

“After almost every establishment or expansion of a reservation (in Arizona), it was followed by the creation of new county lines,” said Torey Dolan, a Native Vote Fellow with the Indian Legal Clinic of the Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.

Dolan, who is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, noted this dynamic has occurred with about half of all tribes in Arizona, creating additional institutional barriers to disenfranchise tribal communities.

“The system was not built for Natives to participate,” added Dolan.

Navajo Nation, which is the largest tribe in the United States and inhabits land the size of West Virginia, is trisected by Arizona’s county lines. The three counties it is divided into — Coconino, Navajo and Apache  — each have a distinct model of voting with different restrictions on where to physically cast a ballot.

The Arizona Democratic Party sought to organize at the county level when it launched “Project 15/30” last summer. It was a year-round community building effort designed to educate and register voters in the state’s 15 counties and 30 legislative districts.

State Democrats lauded the initiative as a proactive measure ahead of the 2022 midterms, as they hoped the program’s emphasis on grassroots organizing would preserve the left’s progress in Arizona, including increasing the Native vote, and defend against disinformation and voter suppression efforts targeted at minority voter blocs.

But since its launch, the state Democratic Party has folded “Project 15/30” back into its existing electoral projects, said Charlie Fisher, executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party.

He said the ADP still has a full-time deputy political director whose job is to build and strengthen relationships with the state’s 22 tribal nations, mainly working with tribal leaders to support their volunteer efforts. Fisher added that the state party had contributed to both the Navajo and Apache County Democratic parties in 2021 and planned to do so again this year.

But Jaynie Parrish, the executive director of the Navajo County Democrats, said the state party could do more.

Since 2020, Parrish and the small group of community organizers that compose the Navajo County Democrats have mobilized onto reservations and operated phone-bank and voter-registration events tailored to Arizona’s tribal communities. This is a year-round effort to educate and encourage those they consider “high potential voters” to get in the habit of casting a ballot, all while on a strapped budget and with limited support from Democratic organizers.

“They’re just not there,” Parrish, the executive director of the Navajo County Democrats, said regarding the Democrats’ voter outreach efforts to tribal communities. “They just can’t move like we can, they can’t make decisions as quickly as we can. If we want to do something, we do it.”

Fisher said that since the tribal nations are at different stages of reopening their lands during the pandemic, much of the state party’s activity is done remotely.

Many tribal leaders and voting activists also have noted the largest threat to the Native turnout for the upcoming midterms is the unknown effect of voter suppression bills working their way through the GOP-led state legislature.

While some proposed bills are designed to make voting harder, the state’s GOP is also passing legislation designed to subvert voter outreach efforts. A ban on private funding for election administrators enacted recently by the Arizona state legislature will prohibit counties from receiving grants to help run elections and voter outreach on the pretext of expunging external influences from state elections.

But some of the most underfunded counties in the state that benefited from private grants from nonprofit organizations are home to tribal communities, and the extra money in many cases went to political advertisements and outreach personalized to Native voters, which in large part catalyzed voter turnout in 2020.

With less money coming from outside donors, counties will likely divert funds and voter registration and education resources away from reservations to get the most “bang for their buck” when it comes to outreach, according to Dolan.

Parrish’s team is currently contextualizing the latest voting changes in Arizona to educate tribal communities, adapt their voter outreach model and determine ways to support under-resourced county offices that may struggle to galvanize the Native vote because of the latest ban on private funds.

But her effort can only go so far without the sustained support of the Democratic party, she said.

“We’re giving you our plans, we’re telling you what to do, we’re making the roadmap for you like, I don’t know how much easier we can make this for you guys without charging a consulting fee, which you paid someone from D.C. $10,000-plus to figure it out for you, but they don’t know anything about our community,” Parrish said.

 

 

 

 

By Yadira Gonzalez

Armando Alvarez, 20, a resident of Phoenix’s heavily Latino neighborhood of Maryvale, said his political awakening came not because of the turmoil surrounding the 2020 presidential election, but because of a local initiative that directly impacted his life.

​​Alvarez said that it was only after Arizona voters passed Proposition 208 in 2020 that he learned it taxed those with an income exceeding $250,000, raising money towards teachers’ salaries and school initiatives and benefiting his own public school.

“I didn’t know about that and that was literally something we voted on in 2020,” Alvarez said. (A superior court judge struck down the proposition as unconstitutional in March 2022.)

“One of the biggest things is letting the community and most importantly letting the younger people know voting is something that affects every one of us,” he added.

​​Alvarez credits his political education to the Maryvale YMCA, a supportive center for its largely Latino community, offering the area’s youth jobs and services. During high school, Alvarez interned for the YMCA’s Community Action Team, a group of young individuals promoting social justice and civic engagement in Maryvale.

During a recent evening at the Y, Alvarez and other young people involved in the Community Action Team said they have come to realize the importance of voting and to see a role for themselves in encouraging more civic engagement in their community.

“If you empower these young people with knowledge, you give them the space to ask questions,” said Brenda Guerrero, the staff coordinator of the Maryvale Y’s Community Action Team. “That’s the only way that these young people, these Latino families, Black families, any kind of POC family is going to fully understand what they hold.”

With the help of CAT and Guerrero, Alvarez obtained a job with Central Arizonans for a Sustainable Economy, an organization working towards economic and social justice for immigrants and refugees in Arizona. Alvarez said his experiences at CAT and CASE showed him the link between civic engagement and change within his own neighborhood.

“Finding this other job and seeing how voting is a huge, huge, huge, huge thing that affects our communities,” Alvarez said. “It opened my eyes to stuff like with political or civil liberties.”

The CAT program at the Maryvale YMCA is one of a number of efforts to engage Latinos in politics as the 2022 midterm elections approach. Others include Chicanos Por La Causa, which invested $10 million, in April, to get out the Latino vote in Arizona, as well as the work of the nonpartisan Get Out The Vote campaign.

During the 2020 presidential election, Latino communities played a crucial role in Joe Biden’s win in Arizona and across the country, according to an analysis from UCLA. In 2020, Latino voter turnout surged 31 percent nationally over 2016. In Arizona, 71 percent of Latinos voted for Biden during the 2020 presidential election. In precincts with a high density of Latinos, Biden received 74 percent of the votes compared to 46 percent in precincts with a lower density of Latinos.

Prof. Lisa Magaña from the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University said that, in past elections, grassroots organizations have effectively mobilized Latino voters simply by involving them in political discourse. Magaña predicts this will continue.

“Grassroots groups are going to target first time ever people to vote… People that had never, ever been thought of themselves as politically engaged, politically active,” Magaña said.

However, members of the GOP have made several attempts to counteract the work of grassroots organizations by passing legislation that may stymie the members of the new electorate, such as naturalized immigrants. Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona recently signed into legislation a proof-of-citizenship law which could preclude thousands of individuals from voting in federal elections.

According to Prof. Eileen Diaz McConnell, a demographics expert from ASU’s School of Transborder Studies, laws like this may cause unnecessary trouble for those who may not know where their documentation is.

Yet, McConnell also said that the knowledge of these laws often spurs those who are foreign-born to become even more politically engaged.

“More anti-immigrant laws actually lead more immigrants who are naturalized to register to vote because they’re responding to the fact that they don’t have any rights,” McConnell said.

Ulises Ruiz, a CAT intern at the Maryvale Y, said he feels motivated to vote in the upcoming election to improve college opportunities for his loved ones who are DACA recipients. A November 2022 ballot measure will ask Arizona voters to approve in-state tuition at state-run universities to DACA students. Currently, they pay out-of-state tuition.

“I see a lot of family and friends just graduate from high school and not pursue any further education because they believe they’re restricted in terms of what grants they can get and what scholarships they can get,” Ruiz said.

Latinos of all ages are investing their time and energy in their own communities in hopes of improving representation for the group as a whole. Children are relaying information to their parents who historically may not have been provided with as many resources.

“We, the young people, are able to educate ourselves and then also educate our parents, then that makes a big difference,” Alvarez said.

According to Guerrero, raising awareness among Latinos about the impact they can have in political systems, especially at a young age, may lead to a realization of their political strength.

“Whatever you want, educate yourself and vote on it,” Guerrero said.

Measures like Proposition 208 are a great example of issues worth learning more about, according to Alvarez. Through his work at CASE, he continues to educate those in his community on ballot-proposals that would directly impact them.

In April, Alvarez worked with his team to collect signatures for a referendum on a $1.8 billion development project called the South Pier in Tempe Town Lake. The Tempe City Council authorized the project in February and gave the developers a tax break lasting eight years. Alvarez and those at CASE wanted to educate the people of the community and have them play a greater role in its fate.

“Literally none of us know how it’s going to benefit us,” Alvarez said. “What we’re doing is letting them know and letting them decide.”

Whether the referendum will be added to the ballot has not been decided yet, but the seeds of political knowledge and empowerment have been planted.