Native Americans face obstacles to voting at every step of the electoral process. That was the focus of a recent report as well as a Sept. 30 webinar on voting access in Indian Country.
The report, titled “Obstacles Persist: According to the Data,” states, “Those barriers are not random. They are rooted in decades of exclusion, chronic underinvestment in rural and tribal infrastructure, and election administration systems that were not designed with Indian Country in mind.”
The report was prepared by the research firm Blockwell Consulting and the Native American Rights Fund, or NARF. It relies on data from a survey done by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s Election Administration and votig Survey for 2020, 2022, and 2024, which it says is the most comprehensive source of election administration data available at the county level.
The report focuses on the 13 states with the highest overall Native American populations (Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska, California, Nevada, Washington, Oklahoma, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) and 30 counties where Native Americans constitute more than 25 percent of the population.
“Geographic isolation, unreliable mail service, nonstandard addressing systems, limited internet access, and inadequate polling resources combine to make voting harder in heavily Native American counties than anywhere else in the country,” the report says.
The Navajo Nation is one of the places where voting can be a challenge.
In a 2024 article in the Arizona Mirror, journalist Shondiin Silversmith wrote, “On Tuesday, I spent the day driving around the Navajo Nation and some parts of the Hopi Nation, stopping off at polling locations in Navajo and Apache counties. By the end of the day, I had spent nearly 10 hours in my car, driving more than 250 miles, and visited only 10 polling locations. If I were in Maricopa County, I would’ve hit 10 polling locations within a few hours and far fewer miles.
“There were over 230 polling places in Maricopa County, Apache County had only 44, while Navajo County had just 39.”
During the webinar, attorney Allison Neswood of NARF said challenges for Native voters include registration, because many may not have online access or a residential address in the conventional sense.
In some places, even mail delivery is a challenge, “so that impacts your ability to receive or send a registration,” Neswood said.
Staying registered is another hurdle, because confirmation notices, which are mailed to voters asking them to confirm where they live, may be returned as “undeliverable.”
Returning ballots can also be difficult, as it may be miles to the nearest post office. Neswood said that even measures such as mail-ballot dropboxes may not help people who can’t receive their ballots at home or who do get their ballots but find that a dropbox they used has been removed.
In Arizona’s Apache County, which is part of the Navajo Nation, the number of dropboxes was reduced from 10 in 2022 to six in 2024.
“Dropbox availability went down from the midterm election to the last presidential election whereas dropbox use went up,” said Megan Gall of Blockwell Consulting, one of the authors of the report, during the webinar. “I can’t speak for Apache County on why that was the case. The resources are moving in the wrong direction for the use.”
However, Neswood said one good change in Arizona and Apache County is the implementation of vote centers, where voters can cast their ballots in their county even if the center is not in their precinct.
“Across three election cycles and every stage of the voting process, Native voters in Select Counties face barriers that compound one another and accumulate into a participation gap that is larger than any single metric conveys,” the report says in its conclusion. “Registration rejections feed into voter roll removals. Voter roll removals feed into provisional ballot use. Provisional ballots are rejected at roughly double the national rate. Mail ballots are less viable in communities where mail delivery is unreliable. Drop boxes are disappearing in presidential election years precisely when turnout is highest. Voting machines are scarcer in Native counties than in comparable counties elsewhere. No single one of these findings is an accident or an anomaly. Together they describe a system that presents Native voters with repeated opportunities to be turned away, at registration, at the mailbox, at the polls, and at the point where a ballot is counted or discarded.”
Resources:
https://vote.narf.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2026-narf-obstacles-persist-voting-report.pdf
