November 2024 Update: Congratulations to Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and Spirit Lake Tribe who successfully advocated for a fair voting map for their communities. With a fair map in place, North Dakota’s District 9 saw three Tribal members —Marcellais, Davis, and Brown—elected to the State Senate and House in 2024. They will join Representative Lisa Finley-DeVille from MHA Nation who retained her seat in District 4a.
On October 22, 2024, a panel of U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals judges heard arguments from the North Dakota lawsuit Turtle Mountain Chippewa et al. v. Howe in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The North Dakota Secretary of State challenges the district court decision recognizing that North Dakota unlawfully diluted Native American voting rights. The North Dakota Secretary of State also challenges private plaintiffs’ ability to bring Voting Rights Act claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a right the lower court upheld in 2022.
The North Dakota Secretary of State continued to expend tax-payer dollars to defend the results of a redistricting process that excluded reservation voter input. The state produced the 2021 North Dakota Legislative District map, which a federal court ruled illegally diluted the impact of Native American voters. Despite receiving a longer than normal deadline to remedy the illegal map, North Dakota did not propose a new map. Due to the state’s non-action, the federal court ordered fair maps into place in January 2024 to promptly restore the civil rights of each Native voter in subdistricts 9 and 15, prior to the start of the 2024 election.
The North Dakota Secretary of State argued to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit that no citizen has a right to sue to protect their individual rights under Section 1983 because the state had not infringed individual rights, but rather harmed voters collectively through vote dilution.
A team including the Native American Rights Fund, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), the Law Office of Bryan L. Sells, LLC, and Robins Kaplan LLP represent the Native voters and Tribal Nations defending their right to a fair voting map and the long-standing right to sue state redistricting officials for civil rights violations.
“The North Dakota Attorney General’s anti-voter arguments threaten long-held protections each U.S. citizen has: Native and non-Native voters alike have a right to sue state officials who violate their civil rights, under Section 1983 and the Voting Rights Act,” said NARF Staff Attorney Lenny Powell.
For the team defending the Native voters’ and Tribal Nations’ right to a fair voting map and the long-standing right to sue state redistricting officials for civil rights violations, CLC Attorney Mark Gaber presented oral arguments, beginning by stating: (starts at 17:21)
“For the first time in over 30 years, there are zero Native Americans serving in the North Dakota State Senate today, because of the way that the 2021 redistricting lines were configured. The District Court correctly ruled that this violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.”
Gaber emphasized that the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the right to an undiluted vote as an individual right. Quoting from the Supreme Court’s opinion in Shaw v. Hunt, said he explained to the Eighth Circuit: “[T]he right to an undiluted vote does not belong to the minority as a group, but rather to its individual members.”
How You Can Help
Wesley Davis, Zachery S. King, Collette Brown, Turtle Mountain Chippewa and the Spirit Lake Tribe not only defend their rights to a lawful redistricting process in this lawsuit; they also defend the rights all Americans currently have to sue state officials for unlawful actions that violate one’s civil rights. NARF thanks every client, supporter, and donor who has made it possible to hold North Dakota accountable.
Please share their story and donate, if you can, to support this ongoing battle for a lawful voting map in North Dakota. Voters should choose politicians, not the other way around.
More about Turtle Mountain Chippewa v. Howe: https://narf.org/cases/north-dakota-redistricting-map/
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