A recent report from NARF examines Native voting across the entire election process, from registration and voter roll maintenance through mail voting, provisional ballots, and ballot counting. The report is titled Obstacles Persist: According to the Data by Megan Gall and Kevin Stout of Blockwell Consulting, will NARF’s Allison Neswood contributing.
Using federal election data from 2020, 2022, and 2024, NARF focuses on 30 counties where Native people constitute at least 25 percent of the population. In those counties, confirmation notices increased 178% and provisional ballot use more than doubled between 202 and 2024. In 2024, 4 in 10 provisional ballots were rejected (down from nearly 2 in 3 in 2020), compared with about one in four nationally.
These barriers operate as a sequence, since a failure at one stage can push a voter into the next stage, where another barrier awaits. Unreliable mail can prevent a voter from receiving a confirmation notice, placing the voter’s registration at risk. That voter may then arrive at the polls and be directed to cast a provisional ballot, which itself carries an elevated risk of rejection.
These aren’t isolated administrative mistakes. They’re a chain of burdens produced by election systems that fail to account for the realities of Indian Country, including unreliable mail, nonstandard addresses, limited broadband, and inadequate polling infrastructure. The system transfers the resulting labor, uncertainty, and risk of error onto Native voters.
NARF’s report shows why fixing one barrier isn’t enough. Native voting access must be addressed as a connected system that affects not only individual voters, but the political power of Native communities to influence decisions that directly affect them.
