The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and their South Dakota advisory committee have released a report focused on voting access in the state – particularly in reservation country.
The bipartisan, 11-member commission has spent the last two years questioning the state’s voting access from a civil rights perspective.
Travis Letellier is an economist and chair of the state advisory committee. He said after careful consideration, they have an answer.
“Sometimes if you live on a tribal area or a reservation, your local polling place might be a county seat that might be prohibitively far to drive to vote," Letellier said. "Then when you try to do an early vote – what if you have a nonstandard address? Where you live on tribal land, and you don’t actually have a post office?”
Difficulty with voter ID regulations proves not every access challenge is geographic in nature.
“One of the recommendations the committee said was what if the South Dakota Secretary of State published a simple, one page infographic that could go out to county auditors’ offices and polling locations that was just ‘showing up to vote? Here’s what you need to bring.’ ‘Don’t have an ID? That’s okay, here’s what you do.’ It might cost a little money to print them off, but the gain to the average voter outweighs the cost of printing an infographic,” Letellier said.
The board's recommendations aren’t legally binding.
Federal civil rights analyst Mallory Trachtenberg said these findings will now be shared with lawmakers and federal officials. But that doesn’t mean the end of the discussion.
“They’re emotionally charged topics, and civil rights is really challenging to continue to have conversations about these days," Trachtenberg said. "I will highlight that people could walk away from these conversations. Continuing to have those conversations - it can be really painful, but the fact they’re still here and there are so many active committees doing this – it’s pretty impressive.”
Every state and territory in the country has a similar advisory committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.