HRC challenges San Juan County on mail-in ballots

CHINLE

Fresh from a victory over allegedly gerrymandered voting districts, the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission Thursday sued San Juan County, Utah, again — this time over its closure of rural polling places in favor of mail-in ballots.

In 2014, the county closed all polling places except the county offices in Monticello, Utah, sending out thousands of mail-in ballots instead.

The HRC says the mail-in ballots deprive many Navajos — including those who don’t speak English, those who don’t drive and those who only sporadically pick up their mail — of exercising their right to vote.

“Imagine Grandma gets her ballot in the mail,” explained Leonard Gorman, the commission’s executive director. “She doesn’t know what it is to begin with. She waits until her son or daughter visits to explain it to her … By the time that happens, and they help her fill it out, and considering how slow the mail is in rural areas, she may not get her ballot in in time to be counted.”

Besides, Gorman added, a relative is under no legal obligation to translate the ballot into Navajo.

“It’s the county’s responsibility under the Voting Rights Act,” he said.

Translators were available at the polling places under the old system.

Grandma could get in the car and drive to Monticello, but according to the lawsuit, that’s at least a two-hour round trip for most Navajos living in the county — assuming they have a car and the roads aren’t impassable due to a rain or snowstorm.

Many Navajos prefer voting in person, said Gorman, because “when you send your ballot off, you never know if it was received or counted.”

According to Gorman, figures from last November’s election — the first election under the new system — show only 23 percent of active Navajo voters cast ballots, compared to 51 percent of whites, who tend to live in the northern part of the county closer to Monticello.

The suit also accuses county employees of deliberately sending ballots to addresses they knew were wrong.

The Navajo Nation in May of 2014 passed a resolution urging the county to restore the rural polling places, the suit states, but the county ignored the request even though it was supported by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the American Civil Liberties Union.

San Juan County Clerk John David Nielson said he had not seen the lawsuit and declined to comment on the ballot issue, referring questions to County Attorney Kendall Laws. Laws was out of the office Friday.

In response to previous lawsuits by the Navajo Nation, a U.S. district judge has declared the county’s present voting districts for both the county commission and the school board to be unconstitutional as they pack Navajo residents, who represent a small majority of the county’s population, into one district in the case of the commission and two districts in the case of the school board.

Considering the county’s track record, said Gorman, “it’s reasonable to assume this (mail-in ballots) is an intended method of suppressing Navajo voting strength.”

 

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