Arizona voters have been subject to strict physical address requirements since a bill was signed into law in March 2022. The law required voters to register with proof of a residential address, which more than 40,000 homes on Native American reservations in Arizona don’t have.

LaDonna Jacket is a student who lives on the Second Mesa on the Hopi Reservation, tribal land in northeast Arizona. She is also one of the youth plaintiffs named in a lawsuit that is pushing back on statewide voter ID requirements. In a press release, Jacket said that the current law “means Arizona will not let me register to vote” when she turns 18 because each government-issued ID she has lists either a post office box or a description of her home location.

Alanna Siquieros, another youth plaintiff listed on the case, is from Sells Village on the Tohono O’odham reservation. In the press release, she added that the law “allows elected people in power to weed out specific groups of people and keep them from voting.”

Jacket and Siquieros are two of three youth plaintiffs named in the lawsuit alongside two southern Arizona tribes, the Tohono O’odham Nation and the Gila River Indian Community. Before the case, Indigenous voters faced a barrier: no address, no vote.

But, a new ruling may change that. On Sept. 14, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton ruled that proof of address requirements are preempted by the National Voter Registration Act, which now allows for voters without a standard street address in Arizona to register.

“Nobody should, under any interpretation of this law, be getting denied right now based on not having an address,” said Allison Neswood, Native American Rights fund staff attorney.

Neswood said as the plaintiffs await a final trial in November to solidify the judgment, the Arizona Secretary of State’s draft of the most recent Election Procedures Manual reflects “a good indication” that Bolton's ruling will be rolled out. This manual lays out formal guidance to elections officials on how to administer elections.

Voters with a physical address can also receive voting-related mail, participate in early voting and vote by mail, Neswood said. A standard street address is registered with a post office and includes a street name and number. In rural or remote reservations, some residences are not registered with the post office and addresses can be descriptions of the dwelling’s location on a map.

In the major case made up of eight related Arizona lawsuits, the judge ordered that Arizona residents are not required to have a standard street address to vote. The ruling allows for a non-exhaustive list of other documents that will satisfy the requirement. For example, a voter may present a tribal ID that lists a P.O. box or a written attestation for homeless voters. This crushes what Arizona House Bill 2492 previously demanded — that to register, voters must provide proof of a physical address.

“It's not certainly going to increase voter registration. It's just going to ensure that those people who are living in tribal communities where there isn't a physical address aren't excluded from the voting booth," said Pinny Sheoran of the League of Women Voters of Arizona.

Arizona is home to 22 tribal communities. “With the largest number of tribal reservations [in the nation], it is critical that they not be disenfranchised in this process,” Sheoran said.

Data analyzed by the Native American Rights Fund found that on many Arizona reservations, there are few residential addresses per household, according to Neswood. It remains unclear what percentage of homes have standard street addresses, but a report from political scientist Jonathan Rodden found that only 18% of Native American registered voters have at-home, mail delivery services. This means nearly four-fifths of non-metropolitan Indigenous voters have to drive to a post office or distant mailbox to receive mail.

For nearly 20 years, Arizonans have had the option to receive a mail-in ballot. After filling it out, residents can mail their ballot to the county recorder, or drop off the ballot at a drop-box.

“That's in the forefront of some of the voting rights barrier battles,” said Sheoran, president elect and state advocacy chair of the voting advocacy group.

“Even though we're a very heavy mail-in ballot state, it's not something that's working for everybody,” she said.

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About 80% of voters chose to use these ballots to cast their vote, according to the Citizens Clean Elections Commission. In isolated reservations like the Navajo Nation, postal services won’t deliver to non-traditional addresses and the nearest post office could be a 140 mile round trip, according to the Native American Rights Fund.

“It is a specifically native issue where the U.S. Postal Service largely erected these barriers by being so slow to establish some kind of standard addressing program and the ability to deliver mail more closely or more accessibility to people's communities,” said Joel Edman, democracy director for the Native Vote Election Protection program.

Two decades later, the conversation resurfaces

Identification requirements go back to 2004, with Proposition 200. This requires proof of citizenship to register, and photo ID or an equivalent to send off a ballot. But in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the requirement to show proof of citizenship, as federal law supersedes an additional state requirement, according to the Arizona State Law Journal.

“The whole structure and basic concept of Prop 200 was premised on a reality that just doesn't exist in a lot of Indian country,” Edman said. “The idea that everybody has an ID, and that the ID has a picture and an address on it.”

Journalist and author David Daley, whose work centers around voting rights, said proponents of voter ID laws see no issue with showing ID at the polls, as it can be the norm for seeing an R rated movie, buying cough syrup or boarding an airplane. Proponents suggest this safeguard wards off illegal voters.

“The reality is a little different,” Daley said. According to the U.S. District Court of Arizona, there is no evidence of Arizonans attempting to vote illegally without ID. “The fraud that the proponents would suggest is happening simply can't be produced,” Daley added.

Tess Potter, who lived on federally-recognized land in Arizona for 18 years, said she has to live in two distinct worlds: one of her Indigenous identity, the other a modern, evolving nation where “it’s everybody out for each other.”

“Most indigenous individuals don't believe their voice matters,” Potter said.

The 52-year-old filmmaker remembers driving about 10 miles from Yavapai-Apache Nation tribal land to a polling center in Camp Verde to cast her ballot.

The 642 acre reservation, positioned in the high desert of central Arizona, is home to about 700 Indigenous people from two distinctive tribes, the Western Apache and the Yavapai. Located in the Upper Verde Valley and carved out by the Verde River, the land is sectioned into five communities. Potter has now moved off of the reservation, but the now-Phoenix resident said that for a long time the U.S. Postal Service and Google Maps didn’t recognize the reservation.

“They just couldn't find us,” Potter said. “We couldn't get anybody to deliver anything to us for about a year.”

Tess Potter and her daughter, Ashly Hines, after arriving in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy: Tess Potter

But, Potter said tribal communities can make a difference in what candidate wins the electoral college, given the tight margins of swing state Arizona. She added that there is a need to change the mindset of the U.S. government and policymakers. “We have a right to have a voice in shaping this country,” she said.

Daley, who also works as a senior fellow at Fair Vote, said “Arizona in many ways has been ground zero for some of the most egregious and democracy threatening tactics that we've seen. What happens in Arizona quickly gets exported elsewhere.”

Arizona, purple on the map, could tip in one direction by just a couple thousand votes. In 2020, only 10,457 votes separated President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in Arizona. This is a mere 0.3 percent margin, according to the poll site 270toWin.

Laws that raise the barrier to vote in Arizona have the ability to tip the results of a presidential election in swing state Arizona, Daley said. “In the state of Arizona, but also for the electoral college.”

“If we stand together, we are powerful, and we can be that tilt," Potter said, "that extra rock-on-the-scale to make or break somebody's political agenda.”