Few regions of America present more remote or difficult terrain than the vast expanse of three counties—Navajo, Apache and Coconio—in north-central and northeastern Arizona.
As the county names suggest, the region serves as the home of a sizable Native American community. In fact, the largest concentration of members of the Navajo Nation in the country—100,000—reside across those three counties.
These counties sprawl across an area composing a quarter of the entire state, and larger than at least ten entire states. So the Navajo population is widely spread out, with a population density of just 6.3 people per square mile. The population density of the rest of Arizona stands at 56.3.
Among many challenges of such remote conditions is mail delivery. Only 18% of Native Arizonans in rural counties receive home mail delivery at all, a pattern which holds true for the Navajo population. Which means most Navajo families rely on post office boxes to receive their mail.
But that too poses major challenges. Those post office boxes are themselves remote, limited in number, expensive to rent, and often shared by multiple individuals (and the number of individuals who can share the same mailbox is also limited). For most Navajo families, the closest mailbox may be dozens of miles or more away. And due to the limited space at each office, many individuals have to secure their mailbox at a post office beyond the nearest one.
The abysmal state of transportation in the regions adds another high hurdle to the process of receiving or sending mail. Already strapped with no public transportation, only 10% of Navajo families own a private vehicle. And even for those with private transportation, 86% of the roads are unpaved dirt roads, meaning trips to and from those post offices can take hours. Add all that up, and many Navajo families only check their mail once a month. Moreover, the scarcity of post offices and poor transportation also make mail delivery notoriously slow and unreliable.
What do problems with mail and transportation also spell? You guessed it.
Challenges in voting.
Like a growing number of states, Arizona has become a state where most voters—80%—vote my mail. They receive their ballot in the mail, then later use their own mailbox or a nearby post office to cast that ballot. But of course, something easy and convenient for so many Arizona voters turns out to be incredibly challenging if you must navigate mail service in the sparsely populated and poorly serviced counties above.
Because of those difficulties, Navajo voters grew accustomed to using a variety relationships—neighbors, friends and a Native kinship system known as clans—to deliver ballots collectively for the thousands of Navajo voters with neither mail service nor their own means of transportation. Many who could not otherwise vote would have a clan member make the long trip they could not make to deliver their votes for them. It was a system that worked—never a scintilla of evidence that anyone delivered ballots inappropriately or fraudulently—to ensure voting within the cultures and conditions in which Navajos live in rural Arizona.
Until 2016.
In 2016, the Arizona legislature made it a crime for anyone who is not a relative, caregiver, or household member to pick up or return another’s ballot. In doing so, the new law criminalized the very way that Navajos in remote Arizona had been voting. And by limiting the relationship of who could deliver a ballot to those related “by blood, marriage, adoption or legal guardianship,” it excluded the familial clan relationship in Navajo culture that voters had relied upon to deliver countless ballots in those three counties.
Of course, for most voters in Phoenix, this law wouldn’t impact their participation in Arizona elections. But for thousands of Navajo voters, their traditional process of voting had just been declared a crime.
Which begged an important question—does passing a law that imposes such a severe impact on one set of voters, while hardly impacting other voters, violate the Voting Rights Act? What if the group impacted, like those in Navajo Nation, had faced a long history of discrimination in both the way they’ve lived and voted?
This question ultimately made its way to the United States Supreme Court.
And the answer the Court provided in 2021 not only delivered bad news for Navajo voters in remote Arizona. The decision swept so broadly, it neutered a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in a way that deprived communities across America of one final tool that remained at their disposal to combat laws that made voting more difficul.
Class 21 of my Voting Right Academy will focus on Arizona voting, that decision—Brnovich v. DNC—and its aftermath.
Origins: The Arizona Rules in Question
The fever pitch began in 2014. The racially-tinged video that kicked it off, not subtle.
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