New Lawsuit [PDF].pdf

The Spirit Lake Tribe and several individual plaintiffs are suing North Dakota Secretary of State Alvin Jaeger, alleging that the state's voter ID law, which requires a current residential address, disproportionately affects Native American voters and violates their right to vote under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The plaintiffs seek declaratory and injunctive relief to ensure that eligible Native American voters can cast ballots in the 2018 election and future elections. They argue that the law's implementation is "unplanned, untested, and broken," and that many Native Americans lack access to supplemental documentation to satisfy the residential address requirement, or have no residential address at all due to the government's failure to assign one. The lawsuit follows a previous case, Brakebill v. Jaeger, in which the Eighth Circuit stayed an order requiring the state to accept otherwise valid forms of identification that list a P.O. Box or other current mailing address.