Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Bid to make tribal IDs a valid voters’ proof in N.D. advances in federal court

Native American polling site

Tribal IDs do not have residential addresses, which North Dakota Republicans made a voter ID requirement in 2013.

Rick Scibelli/Getty Images

Native Americans have the right to challenge North Dakota's voter identification requirements in federal court, a judge ruled this week.

The decision is a rare, and only marginal, legal win for advocates of Native American political rights. Just last week for example, the Republican-majority Legislature in neighboring South Dakota killed a bill that would have permitted tribal identification cards as proof of identity and residency when registering to vote.

Tribal IDs are also at the center of the North Dakota litigation. State law requires voters to have identification with a verifiable, physical street address. But those can be hard to come by on reservations, where a post office box is what many residents have long relied on.


The Spirit Lake Nation and the Standing Rock Sioux, along with six individual Native Americans, argue in their suit that the address requirement violates the Constitution's equal protection guarantee and also the Voting Rights Act. They were given a green light to press their case on Monday by federal District Judge Daniel Hovland in Bismarck, who rejected the state's effort to get the case tossed out.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs say their ultimate aim is to give the Supreme Court an opening to revisit the tribal ID issue. Two years ago the court declined to reconsider a lower court ruling upholding the address requirement, but on somewhat narrow grounds.

The Republican secretary of state argues the law was designed to prevent voter fraud, the same rationale cited by the GOP legislators who blocked the use of address-free tribal IDs in South Dakota.

But advocates maintain the real motive in these and a few other states is to suppress the Native American vote, which skews decidedly Democratic. (North Dakota did not have an address requirement until 2013, when Republicans acted after big turnout on the reservations helped Heidi Heitkamp win a Senate seat in an unusual statewide victory for the Democrats.)

Seventy of 110 Navajo Nation chapters in Arizona, for example, do not have street names or numbered addresses, which accounts for at least 50,000 unmarked properties, Navajo Nation Attorney General Doreen McPaul told the House Administration Committee on Tuesday.

Democrats at the hearing said that and other testimony underscored the rationale for expansive federal legislation to boost Native American voting rights, which has 94 sponsors but has not begun to move in the House. Among other provisions, the bill would provide federal funding to increase registration sites in Indian Country and mandate that tribal ID cards be valid for registration.

Read More

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

The B-2 "Spirit" Stealth Bomber flys over the 136th Rose Parade Presented By Honda on Jan. 1, 2025, in Pasadena, California. (Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

After a short and successful war with Iraq, President George H.W. Bush claimed in 1991 that “the ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert.” Bush was referring to what was commonly called the “Vietnam syndrome.” The idea was that the Vietnam War had so scarred the American psyche that we forever lost confidence in American power.

The elder President Bush was partially right. The first Iraq war was certainly popular. And his successor, President Clinton, used American power — in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere — with the general approval of the media and the public.

Keep ReadingShow less
Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are
a close up of a typewriter with the word conspiracy on it

Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are

The Comet Ping Pong Pizzagate shooting, the plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and a man’s livestreamed beheading of his father last year were all fueled by conspiracy theories. But while the headlines suggest that conspiratorial thinking is on the rise, this is not the case. Research points to no increase in conspiratorial thinking. Still, to a more dangerous reality: the conspiracies taking hold and being amplified by political ideologues are increasingly correlated with violence against particular groups. Fortunately, promising new research points to actions we can take to reduce conspiratorial thinking in communities across the US.

Some journalists claim that this is “a golden age of conspiracy theories,” and the public agrees. As of 2022, 59% of Americans think that people are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories today than 25 years ago, and 73% of Americans think conspiracy theories are “out of control.” Most blame this perceived increase on the role of social media and the internet.

Keep ReadingShow less
Why a College Degree No Longer Guarantees a Good Job
woman wearing academic cap and dress selective focus photography
Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash

Why a College Degree No Longer Guarantees a Good Job

A college education used to be considered, along with homeownership, one of the key pillars of the American Dream. Is that still the case? Recent experiences of college graduates seeking employment raise questions about whether a university diploma remains the best pathway to pursuing happiness, as it once was.

Consider the case of recent grad Lohanny Santo, whose TikTok video went viral with over 3.6 million “likes” as she broke down in tears and vented her frustration over her inability to find even a minimum wage job. That was despite her dual degrees from Pace University and her ability to speak three languages. John York, a 24-year-old with a master’s degree in math from New York University, writes that “it feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out.”

Keep ReadingShow less