50 Years Ago: The move to a new type of tribal election

If you asked the high-ranking officials for the Navajo Tribe and the Navajo Tribal Council back in November 1965 what the most important thing going on that month, practically no one would say trying to bring peace between the Old Guard and the tribe’s chairman, Raymond Nakai.

There were two reasons for this.

No one in the council or in the chairman’s office felt there was any chance to bring about any sort of compromise to the battle that began the day Nakai took office and had steadily grown bigger as his term continued.

The Old Guard, since Day One, did everything it could to make sure that none of Nakai’s programs were enacted, and Nakai did everything he could to go around the council and get the Bureau of Indian Affairs to approve the changes he wanted to make.

No, that battle would continue for months.

The second reason was that members of the Old Guard finally began realizing that proposals to change the way the chairman was elected would have a major effect on who would become chairman of the tribe for the next 50 years.

Nakai wanted to do away with the election process that determined who could run for chairman in the general election.

Ever since the 1930s, the power to decide who would run for tribal chairman rested with the chapters and not the people.

All of the chapters would hold nominating sessions a few months before the elections and discuss whom they wanted to support to run for tribal chairman. Many chapters would use a secret ballot, but some other chapters would ask people to go to one corner of the chapter house if they supported one candidate and to the other corners of the chapter house if they supported other candidates.

Then the chapter would count the number of votes for each candidate and the one who got the biggest number of votes would be the nominee from that chapter. But the system was a little more complicated than that.

Once all of the chapters decided who their nominee was, the votes would be counted by the district, and the candidate who got the most support from chapters in that district would get a district vote. And the two candidates who got the most district votes would face each other in the general election.

Nakai would often state he had no idea who came up with this system of determining who would run in the general election but whoever it was didn’t know what he was doing.

If you want to know why the system is a failure, he said, you only had to look at the 1958 election when all of the districts had Paul Jones as the candidate with the most chapter endorsements. Jones didn’t get all of the endorsements but he got the majority of endorsements in each district, so he was the only person on the ballot running for chairman.

Nakai pledged when he was elected he would make the process fairer and would turn over the selection of the candidates running in the general election to the people.

So over the past two years, he began making proposals to revamp the election laws and the various committees of the tribal council spent much of November discussing the changes.

Most members of the council seemed to like the proposed changes since it would set up a primary where the voters would go to the polls just like they did in the general elections.

This would eliminate the possibility of any one candidate getting enough support in the primary that he would face no challengers in the general election.

However, there were some who were opposed to the changes because it would dilute the power of the chapters. There was also a fear that if the decision was made by popular vote, candidates running for office would concentrate all of their efforts in the bigger chapters rather than in the chapters that only had a couple of hundred voters.

These individuals also like the current system because they knew it could be manipulated.

Since the chapters only took one voter, candidates realized that it wasn’t necessary to get a majority of voters in that chapter to support them. All they had to make sure was that they had more chapter members at that chapter meeting than any of the other candidates.

That way, they could be able to stuff the ballot box.

Nakai wanted the power in the people and to make sure that the election rules would be followed if the changes were made, he wanted to create a permanent board of election supervisors that would be beholden to no one candidate and who would ensure that the election process was done in a fair and honest manner.

In November, the advisory committee met and agreed to put it on the council’s winter agenda, which was scheduled to start meeting on December 13.

The election change proposal was put at the top of the agenda since everyone expected the debate on this issue to take a long time.

---