Indian Country's Voice: Recognizing, Respecting, and Protecting our Electoral Power

Joe Biden won the 2020 Presidential Election. An ordinary fact and objectively unexceptional opening sentence instead represents a still contested issue in Arizona and the impetus for the influx of legislation targeting the voting rights of Americans across the country. President Biden won the electoral college in what his predecessor once described as a “massive landslide” and became the first Democrat to carry Arizona since 1996 and just the second since 1948, the year Native Americans in the state were extended the right to vote. After President Biden received greater than 81 million votes—seven million more than his opponent and the most votes ever cast for a Presidential candidate— Republican lawmakers across the country introduced swaths of legislation that will make voting more burdensome with the effect of suppressing future turnout. Without impugning their intentions, the motivation is clear: keep Americans from the ballot box to maintain GOP control; or, more specifically, keep Americans who they don’t agree with (i.e. many members of the BIPOC community) from participating in our democracy. They even said so much themselves.