Vote

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 Farah Javed

Rosetta Walker, 62, a tireless advocate for getting out the Native vote in Arizona, recalls a recent conversation she had with a young Navajo woman, a PhD candidate in her late 20s.

Asking whether she was registered to vote, Walker said the woman replied no, she didn’t believe her vote mattered. It’s a response Walker, a certified deputy registrar, hears often as she reaches out to Native Americans, providing election resources to prospective voters in places like the Native Health Phoenix Clinic and Phoenix College.

“I had to come to the terms that you can’t change everybody’s point of view,” said Walker, who is Sioux and moved to the Phoenix area in the 1990s. “But what I was able to point out to her was that your ‘no’ vote is a ‘yes’ vote for the other party. If you choose not to vote, then you’re giving up that right.”

With Arizona’s upcoming midterm elections, Native women like Walker are leading voter outreach efforts to register and protect Native Americans’ suffrage.

One tool they use is the VAN, Voter Activation Network, a database that Arizona Democrats and progressive parties can use for fundraising, organizing and finding voters. As a precinct committee member, Walker uses  VAN to reach out to all voters in district 12, including members of the Gila River Indian Community, just south of Phoenix, who are part of her district.

“We pulled the list and saw that this new area in our district now is about 10 square miles, but there’s only six voters. There’s only six neighborhoods, six houses, because it’s the reservation,” she said. “You drive 10 miles down the road, there’s another little pocket of community, another 10 miles, so that’s what the reservation is.”

Jaynie Parrish, Executive Director of the Navajo County Democrats, tries to bridge that gap during elections by using organizers who live in more distant, rural areas to reach Native Americans.

They also use VAN to target so-called high-potential voters, who rarely vote in midterms elections. However, reaching these Native American voters comes with challenges since there is a lack of broadband access and phone service on many reservations.

“Their phone numbers aren’t working,” said Parrish. “So how did we get a hold of these people? You know, where they live;  you know, what communities they are in; you know their P.O. box. Having a strong offline is still important to us.”

Parrish’s midterms strategy reflects the community-driven approach to engaging with voters that her organization used during the pandemic and leading up to the 2020 presidential elections.

The Navajo County Democrats delivered personal protective equipment, water and truckloads of food to Natives on reservations who otherwise would have had to drive hours to receive supplies. They restarted registering people to vote before the primaries, and ultimately saw a large increase in mail-in voting in Navajo County and a three-fold increase among Apache voters.

Parrish and her organizers also pushed for other nonprofits to hire Native Americans; she credits that strategy with the successful voter turnout in 2020.

“They may not fit your resume checkbox over there, but you know what? Sandra Nelson is the best burrito lady in Winslow, and she comes back every week with the highest voter-registration numbers because she knows everybody because she’s the burrito lady,” Parrish said.

She pointed to “matriarchs, grandmothers, aunties” and her own mother, as people in the community who speak to family members and get them to register. Additionally, The Navajo County Democrats hosts postcard writings, flea markets and phone banks every Thursday that matriarchs participate in.

While Parrish’s organization focuses on getting voters to the booth, the Indian Legal Clinic’s Arizona Native Vote Election Protection Project seeks to defend the right to vote on election day.

The project tries to “reduce the number of tribal numbers turned away from polling sites,” according to Torey Dolan, Native Vote Fellow and member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is one of five women leading the project.

It also contains a network of volunteer lawyers, ready to litigate or advise on any issues on election day. The clinic partners with the Native American Bar Association of Arizona, the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona and the National Congress of American Indians.

While the project is devising strategies for any voter intimidation and possible violence in the upcoming midterm elections, Dolan remains concerned about how funding and burnout could impede outreach.

Parrish shares a similar concern.

“Ninety-eight percent of our operating budget is from individual donors,” Parrish said, adding that donations during the 2020 election season often came through connections that volunteers had in California, where supporters saw more value in donating to voter outreach in Navajo country than in their local communities, which were heavily Democratic.

Parrish said the out-of-state donations offset what she considered limited financial support from the Arizona Democratic Party. “We did get a $20,000 grant last year from our state party,” she said. “But there’s still little to no investment.”

On April 9, Gov. Doug Ducey signed H.B. 2569, prohibiting “the state, city, town, county, school district or other public body that conducts or administers elections from receiving or expending private monies for preparing, administering or conducting an election.” This ban applies to any part of the election process, from installing drop boxes to registering voters. While the implications of this bill have yet to be fully understood, Parrish explained that it will have an impact on her county.

“We were able to get grant money for our county to get more ballot boxes,” she said. “Boxes cost anywhere from three grand on up, but we helped connect the county election office to a non-profit organization that gave them like $10,000 to purchase more ballot boxes. We’re not sure how that’s going to work now.”

In addition to budget concerns, activists and voter organizations have several other contentious issues to balance.

“So many voting rights organizations put everything they had into 2020. It was a presidential election year and there was so much attention on Arizona, but then Jan. 6 happened, and the audit happened and the state legislature just came out against voting rights in ways that they never had before,” Dolan said. “There’s been a lot of turnover in terms of like work and who’s holding what jobs and organizations.”

Despite these challenges and the charged political environment surrounding the 2022 Arizona midterm elections, these Native women show no sign of slowing down their efforts.

Angela Willeford, an intergovernmental relations project manager for the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, tries to motivate Native youth to get interested in voting.

Her efforts to connect with tribal members ages 18 to 24 resulted in a Star Wars-themed ‘May the Vote Be With You’ event on May 4. It featured a cosplay contest, raffle and booths that educated attendees on how to become a poll worker and check one’s voter registration, as well as the importance of elections.

“Am I registered to vote? Do I need to update my voter address? Do you want to run for office?” Willeford said. “Then, we have another vendor. Then we have higher education that we included because of the age group.”

She also explained that the event included a video of the history of the Native vote. Willeford has her own role in voter outreach, having coined the phrase she uses to motivate young Natives to vote, “Our ancestors couldn’t vote, but you can.”

“Because when I first started, I realized that young people didn’t care about voting; they’re like ‘my vote doesn’t matter’,” she said. “How I got them interested was saying, well, historically, you weren’t able to vote. We weren’t able to vote until 1970.”

Willeford’s approach to getting the youth interested in voting proved successful as the COVID-19 pandemic led to older poll workers choosing to not work elections. Instead, the youth in the community stepped up to fill the poll-worker shortage.

Despite some initial issues in getting these volunteers trained, Willeford worked with the county, which will now provide training to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in late June.

“I just want our community members to be able to work in our polls on election days,” she said. “So that is in the pipeline, and we’re hoping to, I hope, it actually will be successful.”

With over 50 voter suppression bills in Arizona as of May 2022 and a lack of in-state funding among outreach groups, Native Americans face a particularly uphill battle in protecting and exercising their right to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. But nothing can stop these women, they say, from fiercely protecting their communities’ right to vote.

“As an older woman, as a Native American, I will stand up and I will have my few choice words,” Walker said. “If you want to say something about it, then go right ahead because this person is going to vote.”

By Geoffrey Shamah

Jaynie Parrish’s mother lives near a post office on the Navajo reservation and has no trouble accessing the internet. Her father, who lives about two hours away, gets no service at all.

“When I go to my dad’s place out on the res [reservation], I get no service; you try calling these companies and it’s like calling a void,” said Parrish, Executive Director of the Navajo County Democrats.

The Navajo Nation is one of 22 federally recognized tribes in Arizona, and although the nation is larger than the state of West Virginia and has a population of around 400,000, about a third of its residents lack adequate internet access — defined by the Federal Communications Commission as speeds of 25 Megabits per second for downloads and 3 Megabits per second for uploads.

Arizona tribes have been lobbying for better access for years, but have been hindered by a slew of obstacles, including the cost of installing physical infrastructure on large, sparsely populated reservations—a problem akin to that faced by other rural areas. Other problems include a legislative history that sought to carve up the ownership of Native lands, as well as federal and independent studies that significantly overestimated broadband access on reservations.

According to the FCC, 67 percent of people living on tribal lands in the contiguous U.S. have access to broadband. However, experts at the American Indian Policy Institute at Arizona State University say the real number is far smaller.

AIPI’s own Tribal Technology Assessment surveyed Native students and found that 35percent use the internet through a personal smartphone, with close to half of those students relying solely on a phone for their internet subscriptions. Another 36 percent of the students still rely solely on dial-up internet access. Of the students surveyed, only 12 percent responded that their main access to the internet was via a cable company, (which in most cases is a fiber-optic connection.)

Average speeds for people relying on dial-up, and even mobile devices, would not be classified as “high-speed” internet. “Fiber is the gold standard,” said E.J. John, a policy analyst at AIPI who is himself a member of the Navajo tribe, noting that fiber enables speedy movie downloads, gaming and streaming.

But when the pandemic hit, most tribal communities only had DSL, which “doesn’t have the kind of capacity to do remote learning,” adds John. He notes that it’s hard to use apps like Zoom on a typical DSL connection, which only runs at around 1-to-7 megabits per second— a fraction of what is necessary for video streaming.

During the pandemic, subpar internet access hindered students accessing online classes, professionals trying to work remotely, as well as political advocates, like Parrish, who has been trying to activate voters in Navajo County.

According to AIPI, one reason that the FCC overestimated broadband access on tribal lands was because it relied on census data surveys. If one house in a census block reported having internet access, the FCC considered the entire block served.

“Here in Arizona, you see rough terrain, you see the mountains, the valleys, what I have here is not going to be true two miles down the road,” explains John. ”That’s why this idea of looking at census blocks is just not the best way to gather this kind of data.”

Today, getting service to many tribal areas, or even updating existing groundwork, is hindered not only by the cost of running cable through rough terrain, but by aggressive treaties that date back to the 1800s when Native territories were carved up into a checkerboard of allotments under myriad of owners. The Dawes Act of 1887, in particular, split ownership of Native territory into public, private and tribal entities.

The effects are still felt to this day as building or upgrading a phone line, fiber optic cable or cell tower requires negotiations among these various entities at every step along the way.

As a result, many for-profit telecommunication companies have abandoned some tribal regions altogether, putting the burden on tribes themselves to get service to their members.

For example, after years of limited investment in rural areas, Frontier filed for bankruptcy in 2020 leaving many tribal residents without service.

“Frontier elected not to invest money in the area because they are a for profit company and it’s very difficult to run a profitable business in rural areas in the telecom space,” said John Champagne, project planner for the Navajo Tribal Utility Association. “So what you see is a lot of tribes have taken over the utilities from for-profit companies and are trying to run them themselves to improve the services.”

NTUA, which has been providing essential utilities like gas and electricity to the Navajo tribe since the 1950s, decided to enter the telecom business in 2012, when it created NTUA Wireless.

The tribe’s leap into telecom was made possible, at the time, by a $42 million federal aid grant, under the Obama administration.

Obama’s American Rescue and Reinvestment Act of 2009 invested around $8 billion into broadband nationwide. Tribal governments used federal subsidies and grants to establish some broadband infrastructure where for-profit companies have failed in the past.

Since its inception, NTUAW has gotten fiber connections to schools, hospitals and libraries, and has also built a wireless network.

Champagne explains that the network the company built in 2012, with the help of government grants and a public-private partnership with ComNet Communication Networks, only covered about 40 percent of the Navajo reservation, but has been growing every year.

Now, the Biden administration’s American Recovery Plan Act of 2021 has promised over $350 billion in federal grants and funds in an attempt to further expand broadband infrastructure nationwide.

Additionally, the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program has been assisting low-income households across the country to pay for internet services.

However, NTUAW has yet to lay any fiber directly to homes. A pilot project in Window Rock, using ARPA funding, that will connect about 30 of the more-populous communities on the reservation to fiber, within the next 18 months, is expected to test adoption rates and gauge how much it will cost the company to build out a more expansive fiber system.

“There’s a tremendous amount of development and growth on the telecom side right now; there’s never been more development in terms of telecom on the Navajo nation, ever, than in the last two years,” said Champagne.

While the increase in funding has improved broadband access on Navajo land, there are still areas on the Nation that lack essential utilities like running water and stable electricity. Experts like EJ John believe that it will still take years and billions of dollars more to close the digital divide in Indian country.

“In the last couple pieces of legislation, there was $2 billion made specifically available for tribes,” said John. “According to our own tribal technology assessment, the need is probably closer to $10 billion. So $2 billion is a good start. But it needs to be more, there needs to be more investment, and just more resources for tribes.”

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.