Assessing the efficacy of early voting access on Indian reservations: evidence from a natural experiment in Nevada

ABSTRACT

An emergency legal injunction in Nevada granted two Indian reservations on-site early voting locations in the 2016 general election. These locations were two of four remote reservations participating in an academic survey to examine Native attitudes toward government and voting. The granting of only two locations out of the four creates reasonable conditions to treat the four cases as a natural experiment in on-site early voting. These cases also add to very limited existing knowledge about factors affecting voting behavior on Indian reservations and the impact of early voting sites in rural locations. We find that on-site early voting substantially increased voter turnout in the general election on the two reservations that received access in comparison to the two without satellite voting. We find little evidence that the reservations that received the voting sites were particularly likely to have high turnout in 2016. These findings provide supportive evidence that reducing the cost of voting by providing convenient locations and longer periods to cast a ballot increases voter turnout, including in groups with limited means to vote and low government trust.

KEYWORDS:

• Native Americans
• voting behavior
• trust
• rural voting
• early voting
• satellite voting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is not clear whether results from this natural experiment can be extended to other “resource poor” populations (e.g., racial and ethnic minorities), given the many unique characteristics and barriers faced by Native Americans on reservations. However, increasing Native voting has positive spillover effects for other minorities in terms of promoting shared partisan and policy interests. Native Americans overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates, as do most African American and Latino voters, hence they have a shared interest in promoting high turnout among all of those groups. As Terry (2016) noted, voting barriers that decrease minority turnout have policy consequences, in that officials will be more likely adopt conservative policies. See also Carr, Schildkraut, and Rank (2017) and Bentele and O’Brien (2013).

2 According to the 5-year estimate of the American Community Survey, the level of educational attainment for Native Americans in these counties (Elko, Churchill, Washoe, Lyon and Mineral) is extremely low. The percentages of Native American men with college degrees or better ranges from 1.2% to 9%, while among Native American women, the range is from 2.3% to 6.5%. The comparable overall rate in Nevada is 23.7% (U.S. Census Bureau 2018).

3 Less than half of Nevada respondents to the NAVRC survey stated they had complete trust in any form of non-tribally administered election (NAVRC 2018). This contrasts with responses among the general population in Nevada to the 2016 Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE), which found that roughly three-quarters of respondents had complete confidence that their vote would count. For data and full report on 2016 SPAE survey see: Charles Stewart “2016 Survey of the Performance of American Elections.” https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Y38VIQ.

4 According to conversations with Duck Valley Reservation residents, they have an agreement that allows both those living in Idaho and those in Nevada to register their vehicles in Idaho, which has nearer Department of Motor Vehicles offices and has lower registration fees. Several expressed fears that Nevada officials would retaliate against them by taking away their Idaho car registration, if they pushed for a voting site on the reservation.

5 The median income of Incline Village in the period 2007–2011 was $93,831 (American Communities Survey).

6 As noted earlier, part of the Duck Valley Reservation is in Idaho, although most of the population lives in Nevada.

7 Yerington population estimates include the Yerington Reservation and Campbell Ranch. Duck Valley estimates are available from Census block 9401 in Nevada.

8 The lowest per capita voter turnout was 31% in 2004. The highest per capita turnout was in 2016 at 43%. The population in Walker River decreased between 2008 and 2016, rendering a 302 vote total a higher per capita value.

9 Results for vote totals show highly consistent results, shown in Appendix Figure A1.

10 We also show the results shown in Figure 4 are not driven by the relatively short travel distance to the polls from the Yerington Reservation. Results without Yerington are show in Online Appendix Figure A2 and Table A4.

11 There is a substantial body of research showing that trust and electoral participation increases among African American and Hispanic voters when there are poll workers of the same race at polling locations (King and Barnes 2019) and given the history of discrimination against Native voters, we expect there is a similar dynamic among Native Americans.

12 White’s (2019) study of friends and family members of people, who have interacted with the criminal justice system, provides additional evidence of how voting or in her research, not voting, is affected by context. Given the deleterious effects of felony disenfranchisement laws on minority populations, the creation of mechanisms that facilitate making electoral participation a positive, community experience are of importance to not only Native Americans, but more broadly of interest to scholars within the race and ethnic politics sub-field.