In a stunningly antidemocratic move, on May 14, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit issued a decision in Turtle Mountain Chippewa v. Howe. Subsequently, voters in seven states in the court’s circuit are now unable to sue to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act’s ban on racial discrimination.
This is a loss for Native American voters in North Dakota who have been fighting for a fair map since 2021, and it sets a dangerous precedent for other voters across the country whose voices would otherwise be silenced without the ability to fight for a responsive government.
“Today’s ruling wrongly forecloses voters disenfranchised by a gerrymandered redistricting map, as Native voters in North Dakota have been, from challenging that map under the Voting Rights Act. Native voters in North Dakota have struggled for nearly a century for the right to vote and for inclusion in the democratic process and Tribal Nations and Native voters will continue to fight to defend their rights,” said NARF Staff Attorney Lenny Powell.
After uprooting settled law in a 2023 decision concluding that only the U.S. Department of Justice is authorized by the VRA to file lawsuits, the Eighth Circuit has doubled down and further weakened voters’ power in Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota to challenge unfair maps by closing off voters’ access to the country’s generally applicable civil rights statute, Section 1983, as a means to enforce the voting guarantees of Section 2 of the VRA.
NARF—alongside Campaign Legal Center , Robins Kaplan, LLP, and The Law Office of Bryan L. Sells, LLC—represent Native American voters on the Turtle Mountain Reservation and Spirit Lake Reservation in North Dakota in this case.
More about Turtle Mountain Chippewa v. Howe: https://narf.org/cases/north-dakota-redistricting-map/
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