Filmed through dust-ruddied air and a cracked windshield, a 36-second timelapse of miles of lumpy dirt roads and remote highways in southeastern Utah shows Daylene Redhorse’s hourlong drive to her nearest polling place in San Juan County.
Redhorse, who has worked for years to ensure members of the Navajo Nation have access to the ballot, wanted to illustrate how much effort it would take for her and other members of her community to vote if Utah moves away from conducting elections by mail.
Utah was the last state to have laws on its books barring Native Americans from voting, with their enfranchisement in the Beehive State coming only a generation ago.
To Redhorse and Tara Benally, both Diné women who work as organizers with advocacy group Stewardship Utah, a number of election reforms Republican state lawmakers are pushing this year would continue a legacy of discriminating against Utah’s Indigenous people at the ballot box.
“This is just another form of the Long Walk — being recognized as a citizen or being allowed to vote,” Benally said, adding, “It’s that creation of distrust with the federal government that’s happening all over again, and those traumas being experienced all over again.”
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tara Benally is shown amid a redistricting fight in San Juan County in 2017.
Among the proposals that Redhorse and Benally are speaking out against is one that would require that ballots mailed to voters be returned in person, and with an ID. Under Salem Republican Rep. Jefferson Burton’s “Amendments to Election Law,” or HB300, voters would only be able to return their ballots by mail if they apply in person ahead of the election.
The bill will likely change as it moves through the legislative process, but it’s unclear the extent to which Utah’s universal vote-by-mail system will be preserved. Utah is one of eight states — most of which are in the West, where Native American populations tend to be higher — where registered voters receive a ballot and can vote through the mail.
From suing to be allowed to register to vote to fighting for translation of ballots into their language, Utah’s tribal nations have surmounted seemingly indomitable barriers to voting. Advocates worry the Utah Legislature’s current efforts would only erect more.
“We’ve had participation, but now having to take two steps back if they’re going to do away with the vote-by-mail, that just makes it harder for the people to really involve themselves in a system that has suppressed them,” Benally said.
Still seeking the right to vote
After having voted in the previous general election, Preston Allen, a Whiteriver Ute from Altonah, in Duchesne County, was told by the county clerk that he could not register to vote ahead of the 1956 election because he lived on a reservation, according to a 2023 article in Utah Historical Quarterly.
The state attorney general at the time had interpreted a 60-year-old statute to mean, “Indians who live on the reservations are not entitled to vote in Utah.”
Allen filed a lawsuit on behalf of himself and others in his community who had been similarly prevented from voting. The Utah Supreme Court denied his appeal.
“It is not subject to dispute that Indians living on reservations are extremely limited in their contact with state government and its units and, for this reason also, have much less interest in or concern with it than do other citizens,” the court said in its decision.
It continued, “It is a matter of common knowledge that all except a minimal percentage of reservation Indians live, not in communities, but in individual dwellings or hogans remotely isolated from others and from contact with the outside world.”
While the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, it never made it in front of justices because the Utah Legislature unanimously passed a law in early 1957 — three decades after Congress voted to give full citizenship to Native Americans — that granted suffrage to people living on reservations.
But that was far from the last legal battle members of Utah’s eight tribal nations would have as they sought a voice in elections.
After two Navajo men in San Juan County — where the highest concentration of Native Americans in Utah live — were told they couldn’t run to be county commissioners in 1972 after given incomplete instructions for how they could qualify, a federal court ruled they were treated unfairly, and the county had to allow them on the ballot.
Although the Voting Rights Act was amended in 1975 to ensure Americans who didn’t speak English as their first language had assistance in voting, the Justice Department had to step in in 1983 before San Juan County provided that help to people who spoke Navajo.
(Zak Podmore | The Salt Lake Tribune) Daylene Redhorse hands information on Plus Codes to her niece, Menvalia Redhorse, on October 10, 2019.
More recently, when voting by mail was first instituted a decade ago in San Juan County without built-in assurances to protect Native Americans’ voting rights — like ballots printed only in English unsuccessfully delivered by mail to the reservation — the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission and several members of the tribe sued over how the shift impacted their ability to vote.
A 2018 settlement that extended through the most recent election required that every active voter in the county receives a mail-in ballot before each election. The county prepares translated versions of the ballots, and envelopes have information about in-person voting options on and near the reservation, which interpreters staff.
Redhorse and Benally, meanwhile, worked to assign thousands of homes on the Navajo Nation alphanumerical codes that can stand in as addresses.
In the first election after the settlement, San Juan County elected its first majority-Native American county commission.
“Since then, we’ve had about six other individuals run for office,” Benally said, adding that she believes non-Native American politicians in the county see their political power “as a threat.”
“And so I think going forward,” Benally said, “our effort just needs to be a little bit stronger and to continue to do civic engagement wherever possible, and just tracking legislation that hits the floors, especially around elections, because that’s the basis to everything that we do and how to empower our communities.”
‘How are we going to ensure that their votes are accounted for?’
Under current Utah law, counties are only required to “designate at least one ballot drop box in each … reservation located in the jurisdiction to which the election relates.”
Burton’s HB300 would not expand that requirement. It would, however, continue to allow the use of tribal ID, a Bureau of Indian Affairs card or a tribal treaty card as valid forms of voter ID, whether they include a photo of the voter or not.
Ahead of the November election, San Juan County provided early voting at several community centers and chapter houses on the Navajo Nation, as well as one on the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe reservation, but the hours were limited and only held in the middle of the work day.
“A lot of times, our elders don’t have the means to get there. A lot of our families are on a fixed income, we have a lot of single parents,” Benally said, and she thinks other tribes will experience similar impacts.
Redhorse, who said she has been talking to fellow tribal members about Burton’s proposal, explained, “Most of them are concerned because they drive an hour or two to work every day. They would have to take another hour and a half detour away from home just to get to a drop box.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) House Speaker Mike Schultz talks about public lands, during a news conference at the Capitol, on Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2024.
Just two of Utah’s tribal nations — Skull Valley Band of Goshute and the Navajo Nation — have active lobbyists at the Capitol.
Although a lobbyist for the Navajo Nation had not received permission to give an interview before this article’s publication, multiple sources confirmed the tribe was pushing for changes to Burton’s bill that would preserve its members’ ability to vote by mail.
“How are we going to work with people like the Navajo Nation, people that live far away from a polling place? How are we going to ensure that their votes are accounted for?” asked House Minority Leader Angela Romero, who has previously talked about her father’s Native American heritage, in a committee hearing for HB300.
“I know how difficult it is for those people to get in,” Burton replied, “so that’ll be an area I’ll focus on personally. But you’re right, it is a challenge and it is a concern, so we’re going to work hard to make sure that we overcome all that.”
When discussing how his bill might evolve with reporters, Burton said of Navajo tribal members, “They have long distances to travel. We’re talking closely with that [San Juan] county to make sure that the polling stations are available for them.”
House Speaker Mike Schultz, who has championed Burton’s proposal, has repeatedly said he believes the actions would restore trust in Utah’s elections.
According to a poll by the conservative-leaning Sutherland Institute, the vast majority of Utahns are confident in the state’s election results. Schultz, however, has pointed to an audit of the 2024 election that found two “likely deceased” Utahns voted in 2023 municipal elections and three people seemingly voted twice—but no evidence of significant fraud—as a reason to reevaluate the state’s by-mail voting system.
Benally contends that in her community, removing the ability to vote by mail would do the opposite.
“I’m hesitant to go out into my community anymore,” Benally said, “I’m just met with a lot of doubt, a lot of discouragement. I’m just sitting down and talking to the people and trying to help them understand that this is just all the more reason why we need to continue to participate, regardless of what … policies they come up with, the legislation that they come up with.”
She added, “Despite everything that we have experienced thus far in the last couple of 100 years, we still need to stay active.”
