Navajo voters in one Arizona County see their ballots rejected more frequently. Here's what would fix that.

A legal settlement in Utah expanded access to voting on Navajo Nations and influenced similar settlements in Arizona. All registered voters receive a mail-in ballot, but counties also offer early voting and election-day polling locations, where Navajo translators are available. Counties run bilingual radio, print, and social media ads to inform residents about their voting options. The hybrid in-person and mail-in system boosted turnout of active voters in San Juan County’s 2018 election by 10 percentage points from 2014, when the lawsuit was filed because the county closed in-person polling places.

Organizations such as North Dakota Native Vote stationed trained poll watchers at election sites across the state during the midterms to help assist Indigenous voters being improperly turned away. According to North Dakota Native Vote, the organization recorded only one instance of a voter not returning to complete the process after encountering issues at the polls.

The Election Protection coalition is a group of law and advocacy organizations that deploys volunteer attorneys to polling places, runs a hotline where voters can bring questions or concerns, and files lawsuits when necessary to enforce voter rights. The coalition filed a lawsuit after Black voters in Beaumont, Texas reported being harassed and improperly turned away by white poll workers, successfully obtaining a court order removing the presiding election judge from their position.

Legal challenges have protected Native voting rights since the 1980s, when districts diluting native votes were ruled unconstitutional and redrawn. In 2012, three tribes sued to increase access to registration and polling sites. The county settled, agreeing to open offices on two reservations two days a week. In 2018, tribal leaders challenged a law limiting the number of ballots someone could collect on behalf of others. A judge agreed that, by disproportionately suppressing Native votes, it was unconstitutional. The legal challenges increased voter turnout and helped elect more Native representatives.

Native American tribes, community groups, and nonprofits quickly responded to a North Dakota law requiring voter IDs with physical street addresses by holding information sessions, setting up stations to create instant tribal IDs, and placing volunteers at polling stations to assist those who wanted to vote actually be able to do so. Many tribal members rely on post office boxes and do not have an official address on their reservation. Despite some voters being turned away because of their ID, overall there was a record turnout in precincts that include reservations.

Native American voters are disproportionately impacted by restrictive voter ID laws, particularly those that require proof of address because many Native Nations do not use formal street addresses. In response, the voting rights group Four Directions helped create and implement a system that allowed tribal officials to set up at polling places and immediately generate an ID on tribal letterhead with an address based on a location that a voter pointed to on a map. The group also supported lawsuits to expand polling places, lessening the financial and travel burdens for Native American voters.

After a Republican led state law that bans people without an address from voting took effect, Native American tribes in North Dakota began organizing to get out the vote. They even began creating their own addresses. They teamed up with Claremont Graduate University in California and overlaid “ voting precinct maps on satellite images of the reservations and assigned each precinct one address.” “The right to vote can be taken for granted until someone tries to take it away from you, and then it can be the reason you do vote.”

After Colorado passed a state law requiring all jails to create in-person polling places for incarcerated voters, the number of ballots cast from county jails rose from 231 in 2022 to more than 2,300 in 2024.

After procedural errors such as missing dates and signatures caused a significant number of ballots to be rejected, Pennsylvania redesigned its mail ballots to emphasize the areas voters must fill out correctly for their ballot to be counted. Following the redesign, 9.6 percent fewer ballots were rejected for errors the new design tried to address, but other types of mistakes, such as voters not adding the year to the date, increased.

The Rural Utah Project is working to connect rural, off-the-grid residents in Navajo Mountain with fundamental services like mail, emergency medical care and voter access that they were often denied due to lacking a formally recognized address. Google’s Plus Code tool is allowing simple 10-digit codes to be generated anywhere in the world and instantly located on Google Maps. The codes can easily be looked up and doubles as a formal address in most cases.