The system, first approved by voters in 2020, quickly drew Republican opposition after a Democrat flipped the state’s single U.S. House seat in 2022, the first time it was used. But the state’s predominantly Native areas formed a bulwark to defend it this fall, despite notorious barriers to political participation in these more rural and remote regions.

The measure to repeal the system trails by 664 votes, or 0.21 percent, with all ballots counted. The small margin means that proponents of repeal may ask for a recount in December, though no statewide recount has changed a lead of this size in this century. 

Areas with large Alaska Native populations provided the winning margin against repeal. Across the state’s three majority-Native House districts, the ‘no’ vote is leading by 2,960 votes, 64 to 36 percent. 

“This is definitely demonstrating the power of us as a block,” said Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out the Native Vote. “We tend to scream into the void that we count, that we matter. If we vote to our full power, which is a quarter of the statewide vote, then we would see a lot more of a representative government.”

Alaska Native organizers rallied to defeat Measure 2, Bolts reported in September, and they worked to educate people on how the new system works. 

The Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) formally endorsed the open primary and ranked-choice voting system last year at its annual convention, saying that the new rules afford Native voters “more freedom, more choice, more influence, and greater participation.” They reaffirmed their support at their convention in October, right before the Nov. 5 referendum.

In the lead-up to Election Day, Native leaders worked to grow turnout by hosting events in dozens of rural villages, spreading the word through radio, and recruiting young people to volunteer at the polls. They also closely monitored each precinct to get ahead of logistical challenges that come up in remote areas, from a lack of equipment to winter storms.

In Alaska’s new system, all candidates regardless of party run in one primary that is open to all voters. Then, the top four candidates advance to the general election, at which stage voters can rank them. The state then tabulates the ballots and rankings until one winner emerges. 

Native organizers told Bolts that they saw the first half of this reform—the open primary—as the most valuable to their aims. Under the old system, major parties acted as “gatekeepers,” and candidates had little hope of prevailing without winning their support and approval, Sparck said. But now, voters can pick whoever aligns best with their needs, regardless of party affiliation. The priorities of Native voters rarely fall squarely into the platform of any one party, she added, and the open primary system allows them to support candidates across party lines.

Data suggests that Natives have embraced this option more than other Alaskans. According to a report by Get Out the Native Vote, over 80 percent of voters in predominantly Native districts split their primary ballots in the 2022 primary, choosing some Republican candidates and some Democratic candidates. That is a far higher rate than the state at-large, where half of voters split their ballots.

Many also credited the new system for contributing to the historic election of Mary Peltola, who won a competitive race in 2022 to become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.

But Peltola lost this month to Republican challenger Nick Begich. Begich already led Pelota as voters’ first preference by two percentage points. Once the state tabulated the ranked preferences of voters who supported minor candidates on Wednesday, Begich gained more ground. He prevailed 51.3 to 48.7 percent.

FairVote, a national organization that promotes ranked-choice voting, pointed to the results on Wednesday to make the case that the system does not favor any one party. Begich’s win, two years after Peltola’s victory, is “a reminder that the reform is completely party-neutral,” Meredith Sumpter, the president of FairVote, said in a statement.

If the result holds, the failure of Measure 2 may have significant repercussions on state politics: By preserving open primaries, it would signal that Republican officials do not need to worry about surviving a partisan GOP primary in 2026 or 2028. Lisa Murkowsi, the moderate U.S. senator, benefited from the new system in her last reelection race in 2022. In the legislature, Democrats and moderate Republicans have formed a coalition to run both chambers; they hope to attract more Republicans now that open primaries appear to be here to stay.

The outcome of Measure 2 in Alaska stands in stark contrast with the Nov. 5 results in much of the country. Measures to adopt open primaries and ranked-choice voting failed this fall in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon. (Nevadans had approved the measure in 2022, but it needed to pass twice to become law.) Plus, Missouri voters banned localities from using it. 

Alaska will remain one of only two states with ranked-choice voting, alongside Maine. It will be the only state with an open primary system, since Maine still uses partisan primaries.

Voters in Washington, D.C., also approved a switch to ranked-choice voting on Nov. 5. Cities including Portland, San Francisco, and Minneapolis already use it in their local races.

In Alaska, the ‘no’ campaign to preserve the current system was led by Alaskans for Better Elections, and it massively outraised and outspent supporters of repeal. 

Philip Izon, who led the effort to get Measure 2 on the ballot, did not reply to a request for comment on its defeat. In an interview this summer, he criticized the ‘no’ campaign for being funded by out-of-state groups, such as the Colorado-based group Unite America PAC and the Texas-based Act Now Initiative. He also told Bolts that he had formed Alaskans for Honest Elections, the group that organized the citizens initiative, because the ranked-choice system was so confusing that his grandfather wasn’t able to figure out how to cast his ballot. He faulted the system as a way to tip the scales towards Democrats.

The ‘no’ to Measure 2 did well in Anchorage and in the southern tip of the state. These are areas that tend to be friendlier to Democrats. But it drew support beyond Democratic voters and outpaced Kamala Harris’ share of the vote in the presidential race by nearly 9 percentage points statewide.

The gap between the ‘no’ and Harris was greatest in areas with large Native populations. Four of the six legislative districts where the ‘no’ vote outperformed Harris by the largest margin are the state’s four majority- and plurality-Native districts. That suggests the results in those regions can’t just be reduced to partisanship. 

In Alaska’s majority-Native 40th House district, the ‘no’ did 19 percentage points better than Harris. Voters there voted against repeal 61 to 39 percent, even as Harris lost to Republican Donald Trump 51 to 42 percent.

The ‘no’ also prevailed with more than 60 percent of the vote in the 38th and 39th districts, the state’s two other majority-Native districts. 

These districts are part of the Bush, a region with harsh weather and large distances between isolated villages and polling places that can discourage potential voters and make organizing difficult. 

The region has a history of disenfranchisement. The state often does a poor job of ensuring people have access to the ballot and some communities lack proper accommodations for voting information and ballots in their languages, despite those protections being guaranteed by the Voting Rights Act.

Native organizers this fall made a mammoth effort in order to ensure that registered voters in remote villages disconnected from roadways could still participate in the election.

Sparck told Bolts that, in the small village of Newtok in western Alaska, voters were caught off guard when they learned just before Election Day that the state had no plan to set up a polling place, even though it was a designated precinct and there had been one there in past elections. There are no roads connecting Newtok to any other polling places; the nearest location would have been across the Ningliq River, which was frozen and impassable by boat. The village also has no post office, ruling out mail voting as a solution.

Newtok is a coastal village that has begun collapsing into the ocean due to rising tides brought on by climate change. Most residents have abandoned Newtok and moved to a nearby village across the river, but dozens have yet to relocate. 

“They assumed that Newtok didn’t exist anymore, without realizing there were still voters in town,” Sparck said. “Those folks would have been completely left out of the entire process. As difficult as it was, we were able to salvage some level of voting. The system was not prepared to work with a region like that.” 

The window of opportunity was slim: A powerful storm was rolling in that would shut down air travel for a week. Jackie Boyer, a volunteer with the Mobilization Center’s Rural and Indigenous Outreach Program, a private organization, flew on a small plane to the village the day before the election to help find a way for Newtok residents to vote. She worked with the Alaska Division of Elections to request a vote-by-fax process and then spent hours setting up a printer for the ballots and troubleshooting connectivity issues. 

She sent out messages through the VHF radio system that most households in the Bush rely on to inform the community that they would be able to cast their votes.

Fifty-five people ended up voting on Measure 2 in the Newtok precinct, which also includes another village across the river. The ‘no’ won handily: 18 people voted in favor of repealing open primaries and ranked-choice voting, while 37 people voted against it. 

“We’ve dealt with issues like this in multiple years. And as climate change furthers and storms become more prevalent, there are more delays with mail and with planes coming in,” said Boyer. “It highlights the unique nature of Alaska and voting in rural areas. It takes a community to get this done.”

The post Powered by Native Voters, Ranked-Choice Voting and Open Primaries Survive in Alaska appeared first on Bolts.

It was just four years ago that voters approved the switch to this new way of running elections. But Republicans have lashed out against the change ever since Democrat Mary Peltola won the first election held under the new rules in 2022, flipping Alaska’s sole U.S. House seat. This also made Peltola the first Alaska Native to join Congress.

Alaskans for Honest Elections, an organization founded in early 2023 in opposition to ranked-choice voting, put an initiative on the ballot this fall to turn back the clock. If Measure 2 passes in November, it would end Alaska’s novel system, under which the state holds an open primary, with all candidates running on one ballot regardless of party, and then the top four candidates face off in a ranked-choice general election. Instead, the state would return to a more conventional approach: partisan primaries, followed by a first-past-the-post election. 

Alaska Native leaders are now working to consolidate support for the open primary and ranked-choice voting system. The state’s largest tribal organization, the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN), formally endorsed the new rules last year at its annual convention.

The AFN adopted a resolution that said the system better represents Native voters by allowing “more freedom, more choice, more influence, and greater participation.”

AFN members have since launched a coordinated campaign to persuade voters to oppose Measure 2. Native leaders say they’ll be reaching people through public radio, local newspapers and pop-up events in rural areas. 

“No system is going to be perfect. Ranked-choice voting gets us closer to something that is equitable,” said Barbara ‘Wáahlaal Gidaag Blake, an elected board member of the Sealaska Corporation, one of Alaska’s regional organizations that manages Indigenous land claims.

Proponents of the 2020 reform are making the case that most Native voters in Alaska are not registered with a party, and that the open primary system is more inclusive for independent voters, helping energize disaffected voters. “Alaskans should be able to choose a person, not a political party, and trust that the process will encourage good public policy,” says the AFN’s resolution.

For Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out the Native Vote, an organization affiliated with the Cook Inlet Tribal Council that promotes turnout in Native communities, the change to the elections system opens up the field to lesser known candidates. “Anybody can run,” she told Bolts. “You don’t have to have the party’s blessing and backing, and that does change things a lot. You have more unique and representative people on that ballot than we have ever seen before.” 

“And a lot of them look like us, and that was exciting too,” added Sparck, who is a member of Chevak’s Qissunamiut Tribe.

The mistrust many Alaska Natives feel towards the political system extends far beyond the exact mechanics of voting. But to Native groups that support the change, the new voting system has been a step towards repairing past harms by bolstering Native representation, and they’re frustrated to see that the state may roll back a reform they believe has worked in their favor.

A long history of voter suppression and gerrymandering, familiar to Indigenous populations throughout the United States, have dampened Alaska Natives’ political power. The geography of the land presents logistical challenges as well. Many Natives live in villages spread across the vast Alaskan Bush, disconnected from major roadways and separated from regional hubs by the rugged landscape that can only be traversed by small plane or by boat. Election administration in the region regularly falls short. There are also at least 20 distinct language groups among Alaska Natives, an additional challenge for political campaigns and organizers.

The federal Voting Rights Act requires that election communications in some parts of the state be conducted in at least one Native language so voters know how to vote, and understand what is on the ballot, but this is often not implemented well. Speakers of Yup’ik, the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in Alaska, sued the state in 2013 with the backing of Native rights groups for failing to provide language assistance. A federal judge ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in 2014, and a settlement agreement required Alaska to improve language accessibility. 

But Native rights groups say the state never fully complied with the court order, and the settlement was extended through 2026. “There’s off-and-on legal battles over access to polling stations, and about having voter pamphlets in languages that we can understand since English is not the first language everywhere, and it is a journey just to get to the capitol for most folks,” said Joe Nelson, the co-chair of the AFN.

For Blake, those electoral difficulties magnify the disillusionment that many Alaska Natives have towards a political system that has continuously exploited their resources, lands and communities.

“There are inequities and biases built into every aspect of our government,” said Blake. “Our constitution recognizes the pioneers of Alaska and everybody that came after. Even in our constitution, we are forgotten. At the founding of our state, we weren’t even allowed to vote.” 

“It makes it really hard to get our people, who have felt generations of disenfranchisement, erasure, and racism, excited about stepping foot into those spaces,” she added. “It is a matter of getting our people comfortable in these spaces that have never ever written laws that feel like they are on our side.” 

Blake regrets that many Alaska politicians don’t talk about how to preserve the subsistence lifestyles prevalent in Alaska Native towns in remote parts of the state, and don’t help residents in those regions keep living off the land so communities can continue their traditional practices and way of life. “All of our people still hunt, fish and gather the same way our ancestors did,” Blake said. “But it’s a slow death by a thousand cuts, where each generation doesn’t realize the rights of hunting, fishing and gathering that are being stripped away from them.”

Peltola, Alaska’s newest member of Congress, hails from the Bethel region, in the Bush, and she has focused on fishing issues since joining the House. She once worked as executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, and she has even missed some sessions of Congress to help her family store fish for the winter. 

“The fact that every summer she gets out there to fish for salmon, smoke it and dry it and share it with family—she is very much a subsistence driven person who lives off the land,” said Nelson. “Many of us consider ourselves salmon people, we really rely on the rivers and oceans here to provide for us.”

Turnout is typically much lower in primaries than in November. But under Alaska’s old system in place through 2020, the summer primary was what decided the final winner in many races—for instance in legislative districts that overwhelmingly lean in one direction or another. 

In the new system, major decisions always take place in the higher-turnout general elections, since the primary’s leading candidates make it all the way there regardless of party. Voters in the fall rank as many of the candidates as they choose; once votes are tabulated, the candidate with the least first-choice support is eliminated and the totals are retabulated based on voters’ ranked preferences, until a winner emerges who has more than 50 percent of the vote. 

Partisan primaries were “a playground of the party faithful,” Sparck said, and it was hard to draw voters in. “It’s hard to compete with the summer. It’s hard to compete with subsistence. How many people in the villages are just out in the wilderness trying to survive, trying to stock our freezers for the winter?”

Until 2020, voters who wanted to take part in the primary had to choose either a Democrat or Republican ballot to participate; critics of this older system say this was a turn-off to independents, preventing them from picking candidates they like in different parties’ contests. 

Now voters can pick candidates from different parties. In the 2022 open primary, the first of its kind, almost half of Alaskans chose candidates from different parties, according to a report prepared by the organization Get Out the Native Vote. 

The shift proved particularly helpful for Native voters to express their preferences: In districts with a predominantly Native population, 80 percent of voters split their ballot.

“More than anywhere else in the state, voters in predominantly Alaska Native communities supported a list of candidates and expressed preferences that would have been impossible to support in a partisan primary,” Burke Croft, deputy data director with Ship Creek Group, a political consulting firm that led the data analysis for the report. “Partisan primaries disadvantage people who want to express preferences across party lines.”

One concern voiced by critics of the ranked-choice system is that it leads some people to waste their vote: If they haven’t ranked enough candidates, their preference may not influence the final rounds of the tabulation. This is called an exhausted ballot.

A recent study by Nolan McCarty, a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton, found that in Alaska’s 2022 election, voters in predominantly Native districts were more likely to end up with exhausted ballots than the rest of the population. The finding was part of broader results that indicated that ranked-choice voting may dilute the voting power of minority voters. The study was released in January by the Center for Election Confidence, an organization that opposes ranked-choice voting.

In an interview with Bolts, McCarty said this may be due to the fact that fewer candidates make direct appeals to voters of color and to Indigeneous communities. 

“I think certain groups are just not mobilized to cast second ballots,” he said. “Voters often only rank multiple candidates if those candidates make appeals to them,” he said. That may change if future candidates “find it beneficial to reach out to those groups to get those second and third place rankings.”

Organizers say they’re working with voters to minimize ballot exhaustion. But some also push back on the notion that an exhausted ballot is a wasted vote. It still allows voters to express their preferences, Croft said, including by withholding a vote in protest against a candidate that doesn’t align with their values.

“We need to understand that [an exhausted ballot] can be a viable, intentional choice rather than disenfranchisement,” Croft said. “Any time a voter steps into a ballot box, they are expressing their preferences one way or another, even if they walk in, don’t fill out any boxes, and turn it in.”

Phil Izon, who runs Alaskans for Honest Elections, the group behind Measure 2, says the ranked-choice system does more harm than good for Alaska Natives and he pointed Bolts to McCarthy’s study, saying, “The research is there but people don’t want to look at the research because it doesn’t fit their narrative.” 

Izon began organizing against ranked-choice voting after the 2022 election and drew quick support from Sarah Palin, the former Republican governor who lost the U.S. House race to Peltola in 2022. Izon, who says he has consulted for Palin in the past, also says on his website that he wants Alaska to hand count ballots, a cause some conservatives have nationwide.

Izon argues that the new voting system doesn’t help independents run for office, as they’re likely to need party support to make the top 4. He also cites a statement against ranked choice by Native Americans for Sovereignty and Preservation, a conservative Arizona-based organization connected to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. 

Historically, debates over ranked-choice voting did not clearly fall along partisan lines, and Democrats have also fought its implementation in some places like Washington, D.C. and Nevada. But the issue has grown increasingly partisan in recent years.

In Alaska, many Republicans turned hard against the new system after Palin’s loss to Peltola in 2022. 

Palin reacted to the result by calling ranked-choice voting “crazy, convoluted, confusing,” and her allies followed suit. Conservatives were also frustrated that the new system meant they could no longer target Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who in early 2021 voted to convict Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial, in a GOP primary. Murkowski was endorsed by the Alaska Federation of Natives and easily won reelection in November 2022 in the final round of ranked-choice voting; most voters who selected a Democrat as their first choice also then ranked Murkowski over her Trump-endorsed challenger.

Peltola, meanwhile, has praised ranked-choice voting and endorsed its spread to other states. “Ranked choice voting is gaining popularity because it’s giving people a better voice in their democracy,” Pelota said in 2022. “People can vote for the candidates they align with instead of being forced to vote defensively every election.” Peltola did not return a request for comment for this article. 

Besides Alaska, only Maine uses a ranked-choice voting system in statewide elections. Maine Republicans unsuccessfully tried to organize a ballot measure to repeal ranked-choice voting, and they also failed to challenge the system in court. 

Republicans in other states have also grown more aggressive in opposing ranked-choice voting in recent years. Ten GOP-leaning states have now passed laws prohibiting local governments from adopting ranked-choice voting systems, and this fall voters in Missouri will decide on a similar ban. “Missourians don’t want more voter confusion and exhaustion when they go to the ballot box than they already have,” one of that measure’s chief Republican sponsors has said. 

This fall in Alaska, Peltola is up for reelection again alongside Measure 2. In November she will face three candidates in a general election that will once again be decided by ranked-choice voting—possibly for the last time if voters approve Measure 2 on the same day.

Nelson, the co-chair of the AFN, now hopes to mobilize Native voters to reelect Peltola and halt the repeal effort. He told Bolts that the tribes in his federation will spread the word through local networks like the regional corporations that manage Native land claims.

“It’s just the whole gamut of tactics you can imagine, including social media and video ads,” he said. “It requires a lot of traveling… In our rural areas, we have to rely on locals there, even posting flyers at the local grocery and that type of thing.”

“The get out the vote effort is something we are always doing,” he continued. “But this year, there is an added urgency because of the attacks on ranked-choice voting and also because our congresswoman is up for election.”

The post Native Leaders Organize to Defend Alaska’s Ranked Choice Voting System appeared first on Bolts.

Cloud is now vice chair of the Southern Ute tribal council, and from the tribe’s headquarters early this summer, she reflected on how much has changed. Since 2019, when Democrats gained a legislative trifecta in the state, Colorado has established a polling place on the reservation and placed a drop box there for mail ballots. The state has also hired special liaisons to promote and facilitate turnout among Native voters. “I don’t want future generations to have to deal with any of what we’ve had to, to get to vote,” Cloud told me. “We should have access to the vote, to shape our own region, our own country.”

Colorado officials are now proposing to go further. In 2023, the state adopted legislation to try something that’s never been done in this country: automatically register tribal members to vote in U.S. elections. 

The program, if implemented, would enable tribes to share their membership lists with Colorado elections officials, who’d then use that information to register every eligible person to vote, while giving them a chance to opt out. Since Colorado already mails ballots to every registered voter, this would necessarily mean getting ballots into the hands of more Native people. “We’ve made real steps forward, and we’re going to continue,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told me recently. “We always try to push the envelope.”

Cloud, like Griswold, sees immense promise in this plan. When she testified in favor of the law last year, she said Colorado “serves as a model for other states to increase voting among tribal members.” And advocates living in those other states are watching. Several told me Colorado’s reform could be transformative if it spreads nationwide: Roughly one third of the more than six million Native Americans who are eligible to vote across the country are not registered, a share far greater than that of white Americans who are unregistered.

And yet, Cloud is also keenly concerned that the program could make her community more vulnerable. For U.S. election officials to automatically register tribal members to vote, the tribes would need to share certain vital information about their members, such as full name, address, and date of birth. Cloud is hesitant to hand this data over to a state that has, over a long history that she knows too well, been an agent of violence.

“When tribes have given out too much information, that information has been exploited,” Cloud said, nodding to U.S. government and industry having used tribal data and maps to locate natural resources and justify land theft, among other harms. “We have to maintain trust and we have to protect tribal members and their information.”

It’s a worry that other tribal leaders and advocates for Native voting rights echoed in conversations this spring and summer. “We’ve had our lists, our populations, kept by the government before—and that hasn’t ended well for us,” Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, a member of the ​​Tohono O’odham Nation and the top elections official in Pima County, Arizona, told me.

Anticipating that data-sharing would generate concerns, Colorado legislators wrote the law to make the program optional: Tribes can opt in, only if and when they feel comfortable with it. Griswold says she is in no rush to implement this program until tribes want it.

Cloud and other representatives of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, along with leaders of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, their western neighbors, have held ongoing discussions with Griswold’s staff to share their concerns, and work out whether acceptable compromises can be found. They’ve met about 10 times over the last year, exploring what safeguards could be put in place. 

Those talks haven’t yet yielded any agreement, though the parties seem cautiously optimistic. The chair of the Ute Mountain Utes even says a breakthrough could come as soon as this year.

Cloud, too, hopes to reach an agreement, but she remains wary. The day we met at the Southern Ute headquarters happened to fall exactly 100 years to the week since Native Americans gained U.S. citizenship. That landmark, Cloud said, at once seems distant and shamefully fresh. “We are the first and original residents of this entire continent,” she told me, standing in a temporary exhibit the tribe set up to commemorate the 100-year anniversary. “The first ones here, and the last to have citizenship.”

We were speaking amid what was, as recently as 1868, a Ute territory of more than 56 million acres. It covered most of what is now the state of Colorado, plus large portions of what are now Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. 

Her tribe today controls less than one percent of that area, a sliver of reservation land near Durango, in southwest Colorado along the New Mexico border. Colorado was once home to more than 40 tribal nations, but just two recognized tribes—the Southern Utes, and the Ute Mountain Utes—are still based here. Cloud thinks constantly about how to protect the 1,500 people enrolled in her tribe, and what remains of their land. 

“When the Europeans came in, and our homelands were greatly reduced, you get a disconnection between humans and nature,” she said. “You get traumatic experiences, and trust issues that Native people have with the United States government.”

This tribe’s journey is a familiar one in the broader story of Native American betrayal: members killed or otherwise oppressed at the hands of white settlers; a United States government that encroached gradually, agreeing to and then violating treaties in order to steal land and resources; and eventually tribes shunted by the government onto the reservations they inhabit today.

In various ways, and with varying levels of success, Colorado’s state government has lately been trying, or at least saying it’s trying, to repair this harm. The legislature here has, in the last few years, passed a series of laws and resolutions intended to improve education, water rights, public safety, and more, for Native people living in this state.

Colorado’s new voter registration reform also came out of that repair work. Proponents see it as a valuable step toward making American democracy more inclusive of the land’s original inhabitants. “Historical voter suppression in Colorado has been against Native people and Native people living on tribal lands,” Griswold said. “Understanding that there is this historical backdrop, I’ve really tried to pursue any means to reverse that historical voter suppression and get eligible people registered.”

The state of Colorado already registers citizens to vote automatically, but only at the DMV, when they’re getting a driver’s license or state ID. The program has been wildly successful at signing up new voters, but voting rights advocates worry that it’s leaving behind people who do not go to the DMV and apply for an ID—including many who live on reservations. 

The new law expands this automatic approach to tribal enrollment lists. This reform would reach tribal members wherever they may reside, and most Native Americans do not live on reservations. Those who do stand to be most affected, experts said, because they are more likely to be unregistered. 

Cloud said she’s all-in on continuing to make voting easier for the tribe, and stressed that she appreciates Griswold’s efforts to build relationships with tribal leaders. But in conversation, she also laid out the difficulties in reconciling her different goals.

“How do we protect our sovereignty? How do we protect our tribal members?” Cloud asked. 

And how, she added, can tribal leaders embed those aims within the mechanics of voter registration?

As she pondered these questions, Cloud received an alert on her phone and paused our interview. A Southern Ute member had been reported missing—a 15-year-old girl, the alert stated, last seen a couple of days prior outside the reservation. 

Cloud wondered if the girl might already be in New Mexico, or even farther from home. She listed her worries aloud: “Has anybody reached out to her family?”

“What has been done to try to contact her?” 

“Have they contacted the neighboring counties, the neighboring states?” 

“Do they have the right description of her?” 

Whenever this happens, and it happens shockingly often—the girl is the third person to go missing from the reservation in a month, amid a national crisis of missing and murdered girls and women that disproportionately plagues indigenous communities—Cloud thinks of her friend Nicole, who vanished from the area two years ago. For days, Cloud told me, authorities assured Nicole’s loved ones that she’d turn up quickly. “Come to find out,” Cloud said, “she’d been murdered in the first day.”

Cloud resumed our interview. With her mind still on the missing girl, she brought the conversation back to registration policies.

“This actually ties in with the voting: It’s the safety of our members,” she said. 

“Knowing our tribal information is out there, we become very vulnerable,” she continued. “People don’t place value on tribal lives. This is very real.”

Three other states besides Colorado—Michigan, Nevada, and New Mexico—have also adopted laws lately to automatically register Native American tribal members to vote; their reforms, too, have yet to be implemented. Like Colorado, these other states give tribes the option to enter into the program but don’t force it upon them. To date, no tribe in any of these states has agreed to do so.

But at least one tribe may be close to such an agreement: the Ute Mountain Utes, whose reservation is bigger than that of the Southern Utes in both land area and enrolled population, could move on this matter soon by entering into an agreement with Colorado’s government, says their chairman, Manuel Heart. 

Sitting in his office on the reservation, Heart echoed some of Cloud’s concerns about how sharing tribal enrollment lists could infringe on tribal privacy and sovereignty. But, after much discussion with the state, he said, he feels ready to get started. He hopes to bring the issue to a vote of the tribe’s elected council soon.  

Our interview took place in early June, still weeks away from the state’s June 25 primary. His mail ballot was sitting on his desk as we talked; he’d already filled it out and was keen to cast it as soon as possible. 

Heart said his tribe, like the Southern Utes, has benefitted from other, recent reforms meant to facilitate Native voter participation: the Ute Mountain Utes now have a drop box on their reservation, plus an in-person polling center for anyone who’d rather vote that way.

The officials who run elections in this area are proud of these voter services, but acknowledge that turnout remains very low on Ute Mountain Ute land.

Danielle Wells, the elections supervisor in Montezuma County, showed me a map of the area and pointed to where her staff places drop boxes, in all the county’s major towns. In the runup to elections, five of the six boxes yield hundreds of ballots each time elections workers swing by to collect from them, she said. In the drop box on the reservation, though, “we see maybe 20, maybe a dozen,” Wells told me.

The June 25 primary would go on to draw especially low participation: Only 3 percent of registered voters living on Ute Mountain Ute land cast a ballot, according to the clerk’s office, a rate nine times lower than that of Montezuma County voters overall.

The gap isn’t usually that wide, but it’s always there. During the 2020 presidential election, for example, turnout on Ute Mountain Ute land was 50 percent, trailing Montezuma County’s overall turnout of 85 percent. In 2022, when Colorado was electing a governor and other major officeholders, turnout on Ute Mountain Ute land was 22 percent—three times lower than the county’s overall rate. A large turnout gap also persists on Southern Ute land, and studies show that this holds true for Native Americans across the country. 

Heart badly wants to increase turnout, but doesn’t fault his tribe’s membership for so often declining to vote. Would you be excited, he asked, to participate in elections that shape a political system so historically hostile to your community, to elect representatives of a government that has stolen from and broken promises to tribes? 

“How is a tribal member going to feel when they’ve always been pushed away?” Heart said. “It wasn’t our choice to be put on these reservations. The United States government put us here.”

To this day, in many other states, tribes are still constantly trying to beat back new restrictions—strict voter ID requirements that don’t accommodate tribal ID cards, gerrymandered maps that dilute their representation, inconvenient polling places, and other policies that make it particularly hard for Native Americans, and especially those living on reservations, to have a say in U.S. democracy. 

Expansive reforms like automatic voter registration for tribal members remain a political non-starter in many states with large Native populations. “Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska would not do that,” Ahtza Dawn Chavez, who runs a non-profit in New Mexico that promotes Native voter participation, told me, naming four states currently under full Republican control. “You have to lay down a solid foundation, and [automatic voter registration] is something that is maybe stage two or three or four of that work. In a lot of states, you’re still at stage one.” 

In Arizona, for example, voting rights advocates have spent years fighting restrictions, proposed by Republicans, that could make voting harder for Native people. Arizonans in 2022 narrowly rejected a ballot measure that would have made voter ID laws more stringent; Native voters would have suffered the brunt of those proposed rules.

Cázares-Kelly, the elections official in Pima County, bemoans the many hurdles that already suppress the Native vote in her state of Arizona. Notably, she told me, it can be challenging for Native folks who live on reservations to register to vote because homes there often don’t have addresses in the format typical of non-reservation lands—that is, number, street name, city, state, zip code.

“The home where I grew up, I cannot give you the address for it,” Cázares-Kelly said. “I can tell you where it is: south off of Highway 86 onto Indian Route 15, you turn right at the red fence, drive down the dirt road. There’s a fork in the road and you take a left. Our house is the first one by the big tree. That’s literally my address.”

Since getting elected in 2021, she has found that even well-meaning officials commonly have little understanding of why voter engagement campaigns and election policies that work for most of the population may not work for people who live on reservations.

In Colorado, both the Ute Mountain Utes and the Southern Utes report that voter turnout is often substantially higher for their internal elections, which are administered entirely by the tribes. Neither syncs their tribal elections with Colorado’s; the Ute Mountain Utes vote on a Friday in October and the Southern Utes vote on a Friday in November. 

On the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, Chairman Heart said, few talk much, if at all, about U.S. and Colorado elections. The land is so far removed from Colorado’s population center—it’s a roughly seven-hour drive to Denver, and is in fact much closer to Albuquerque—that for decades both the Southern Utes and Ute Mountain Utes were placed in New Mexico media markets, meaning they’d receive broadcast political advertising meant for that state and not theirs.

Only in the last decade or so have political candidates started regularly visiting the area. “They hardly ever came,” Heart said. “And once they got elected, they never came.” 

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the first and still only person of Native American descent to represent Colorado in Congress, and one of only four Native people ever elected to the U.S. Senate, feels this acutely, because for four decades he has lived on a ranch on the Southern Ute Reservation.

He is 91 now, and from an armchair in his home, he, too, said U.S. government officials have broadly and consistently failed Native people on policy concerning elections and voting.

“It’s pretty difficult to ask a people who you’ve dominated, whose wealth you’ve taken over the years, to suddenly help support you getting elected. That’s a long jump,” he told me. “Unless you can show somebody how voting is going to help them, they’ll have a lower interest in it.” 

Nighthorse Campbell is bullish on automatic voter registration but understands why tribes may not trust elections officials with their membership data. “It’s not going to take a week or two. It takes years, and years, and years. And maybe it’ll never be universal,” he said.

The ongoing negotiations between the Ute tribes and the state of Colorado over automatic voter registration affect only a tiny fraction of the country’s nearly 600 federally recognized tribes. These two tribes combined have enrollments of under 4,000 people; a successful implementation of the pending reform in Colorado may only lead to a few hundred new registrations at first, and many fewer each subsequent year.

But Allison Neswood, a lawyer with the Native American Rights Fund and an expert on issues of Native voting rights, says there are many eyes on these negotiations around the country. The outcome of the state’s talks with the two tribes could set a landmark precedent stretching much beyond Colorado, she told me, if the parties can identify solutions that satisfy all their goals.

“Once one tribe, two tribes, three tribes start to get the ball moving on this, and show that there’s a way to do this in a way that’s respectful of and promoting of tribal sovereignty, and that’s protective of data sovereignty, I think more tribes will feel more comfortable diving in and looking for their own approach,” Neswood said.

Voter registration laws created a hurdle to voting when they emerged in the U.S. starting in the 1870s, forcing people to declare an intent to vote before they could cast a ballot. These laws, then and often still today, have depressed turnout among people with fewer resources and less familiarity with the political process. To alleviate this burden, Oregon in 2015 became the first U.S. state to adopt automatic voter registration; the policy has since spread to about half of all states. It’s typically implemented at DMVs, for a couple of simple reasons: One, the vast majority of the population visits these offices on a somewhat regular basis, and, two, the offices already collect all the information necessary to determine voter eligibility. But some states are trying to expand it to other government settings to reach even more people—especially lower-income residents less likely to visit the DMV.

Several states, including Colorado, want to try this out at Medicaid offices, and, last year, Michigan became the first state to approve automatically registering people as they leave prison. 

Extending this program to tribal enrollment lists comes from the same desire to make sure fewer people fall through the DMV’s cracks.

Colorado’s reform passed as part of a broader bill to facilitate voting in the state, for instance by expanding ballot access on college campuses. That bill was sponsored by Democrats, and passed with their unanimous support, while most Republicans were in opposition. New Mexico’s reform also passed last year with largely Democratic support, and was also part of a large bill meant to ease voter access. Nevada (in 2021) and Michigan (in 2023) both included tribal enrollment lists in laws meant to expand automatic registration generally.

But unlike efforts to implement automatic voter registration in other settings, the process that’s ongoing in Colorado, Cloud says, requires deep reflection. It invites the state to confront its history of violence and prove to the tribes that the government can be trusted. 

Barbara McLachlan, the state representative for southwest Colorado, whose district includes reservation land of both of Colorado’s Ute tribes, says she understands this caution. “We’re trying to turn a cruise ship,” she told me over coffee in downtown Durango. “It takes time, little by little. There is a generational lack of trust; they’ve been treated horribly, and still are, in some ways.”

When she entered office, eight years ago, she did not know how to even broach the subject of collaboration with Native residents she represented. She said it took years, and regular outreach, to build credibility with the tribes. Both Heart and Cloud say they appreciate her work, and name her as one of few people in state government with any consistent presence on their lands.

Prompted by a bill McLachlan sponsored, state government since 2023 has invited Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute leaders to deliver annual addresses to a joint session of the legislature—a platform these leaders have so far used to highlight lingering injustice and inequity in matters of water access, health care, and more. But McLachlan, who is term-limited and exiting office in January, laments that her colleagues in state government mostly still fail to do the sort of relationship-building that might have made it easier to jumpstart automatic voter registration by now. After eight years in the legislature, she told me, she only knows of one state House lawmaker, besides those already based in the region, who has visited either reservation.

“It’s hard, then, to say, ‘trust me on this one,’” she said, of the voter registration proposal.

To reach that trust now, Cloud and Heart both want concrete assurances that state elections officials can provide enough data protections for their membership lists.

Tribal and state leaders each said they’re still unsure of which policy mechanics might emerge from their negotiation. Tiffany Lee, the La Plata County clerk, who oversees U.S. elections on most Southern Ute land, has not been involved with that negotiation, but, in an interview at her Durango office, she floated a possible solution: The state could seal the personal information of anyone who is registered to vote off a tribal enrollment list. (This is also a solution proposed by Neswood in a policy paper she authored recently.) Colorado, like other states, already offers this option for anyone who wants their information to be confidential. That route is popular with public figures, judges, cops, and others who want an extra layer of protection.

The catch, Lee warned, is that sealing people’s records may make it harder for them to then update their voter registration down the line. If they move, or want to switch party affiliation, they’d have to pursue those steps in person at the clerk’s office, she said. “If we make them all confidential, that stops them from being able to do anything electronically with us, or by phone call,” Lee told me. “So, there are drawbacks.”

Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, is midway through her second and final term in this role. She said she hopes that these policy discussions are resolved in her time, but accepts that they may not be. “The people we’re talking to—them, or their parents, may have been excluded from the franchise in their lifetime. Sometimes things just take time,” she added.

At the Southern Ute headquarters, Cloud and I ambled through the exhibit that commemorated the tribe’s history and the 100-year citizenship anniversary. It contained photos of tribal members long deceased, and posters about the tribe’s relationships with water, land, and one another.

We were nearing the end of our time together, and the missing girl had thankfully just been safely located. 

Cloud pointed to photos of her great-grandfather, her grandmother, her grandfather, her aunt, and other relatives. “Can you imagine what they had to give up?” she said. “You live in two different worlds as Ute people: You’re still very much wanting to be connected to your past and your nature, your language, your culture, your tradition—but you also have to be very aware of what’s going on in your community on the other side, the assimilation side.”

She reached the final piece of the gallery, a poster in the shape of a frame with nothing in the middle. Cloud said it represents the unknown things, exciting and daunting alike, yet to come for the tribe. She said she hopes automatic voter registration will be among them. “This is the future, and anything is possible from now,” she said, looking at the frame. 

“We’ll get there with Jena, with the voting,” she added. “We’ll get there.”

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