Oliver J. Semans, a civil rights activist who lives on the Rosebud reservation of
South Dakota, is a leader of efforts to increase the turnout of the Indian vote.
Indian activists are
outraged over the decision of South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley to count as provisional ballots cast at two reservation polling stations after 7 PM CT.
Poll workers arrived late at two Shannon County stations Tuesday morning, one in Oglala and one in Pine Ridge. Voting hours were extended 40 minutes and one hour respectively. The county, the third poorest in the nation, is home to the Oglala Lakota, one of the divisions of the Sioux nation. More than 92 percent of the population is Indian. Jonathan Ellis reports:
Bret Healy, a spokesman for Four Directions, said Jackley's decision is an "outrage."
"The attorney general is interfering in an election," Healy said. "He is trampling all over Native American voting rights." […]
"It's a (expletive) move by an elected official who is a candidate himself and who has actively campaigned for another candidate – probably the only one that's close," he said, referring to the U.S. Senate race. Jackley is also running for re-election.
But Jackley says state and federal law requires that provisional ballots be used when polling hours are extended. One of the problems with provisional ballots is that many of them do not get counted.
Oliver J. Semans, a leader on the Rosebud reservation next door to Pine Ridge and also co-chair of Four Directions, told Daily Kos that the group is putting all its resources, including lawyers and GOTV drivers, into getting voters to those two polling stations before they close.
South Dakota has a long history of suppressing the Indian vote by various means. Jacking around with voting hours as well as placing polling stations at inconvenient sites is part of the pattern. One of the big fights this year was getting the state to approve use of federal funds from the Help America Vote Act to set up early voting polling stations on several of the state's nine reservations. Some counties did so, but others did not.
The Crow Creek reservation in Buffalo County was one of the latter. The closest early voting site to it was off the reservation in Gann Valley, population 14. The reservation town of Fort Thompson is the biggest town in the county, population 1,282.