Utah's Navajo seek representation after decades of gerrymandering - Polidicks

https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2018/11/01/people-are-energized/ The community gathering took place in the northern reaches of the Navajo Nation. Hundreds of people lined up in view of Monument Valley’s towering red mesas to enjoy traditional singing and dancing but also to register to vote — and end the legacy of racial gerrymandering that, for decades, has blocked Native Americans from power in this isolated corner of the American West. Here in southern Utah’s redrock country, as in other rural reaches of the U.S., Democrats are working hard to make the so-called blue wave a reality. But the history of disenfranchisement has cast a long shadow over the Navajo Nation, one they hope they can throw off in the election. Today, American Indians, who lean heavily Democratic, make up a slight majority in San Juan County, which encompasses this part of Utah. But for decades they were “packed” by Republican officials into a single district in the county’s southernmost reaches, echoing other partisan gerrymandering efforts across the U.S. In 2016, a federal judge ruled that San Juan County had violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by illegally drawing contorted voting districts to disenfranchise American Indian voters. In a follow-up ruling last December, the judge handed down newly drawn district maps that give Navajos a majority by population in two of the county’s three commission districts. If Navajo candidates win next week, it could reshape the region. The inequitable drawing of voting districts has meant that Navajos have never held a majority on the school board or County Commission. (In fact, the first Navajo county commissioner, Mark Maryboy, was only elected in 1986, nearly 30 years after American Indians were granted the right to vote.) As a result, some Navajos say they have seen funding for classrooms, roads and infrastructure pass them by. The 2016 redistricting order was followed by a legal settlement requiring mail-in ballots to be distributed in the Navajo language as well as in English. The settlement also requires San Juan County to open three satellite polling places, each staffed with a Navajo translator. In response to these legal victories, there has been a concerted pushback from entrenched Republican interests. Phil Lyman, a powerful county commissioner running for a seat in the state Legislature, told one reporter that he would not comply with the redistricting order and would be “happy to be held in contempt." Local Democrats have accused county officials of failing to observe the redrawn boundaries. During the June primary, for example, hundreds of voters received ballots with candidates from the court-invalidated districts; others received ones with the wrong party affiliation. In addition, said Adakai, hundreds of voter registration cards were reportedly “lost” by the county clerk’s office. “They’re worried that the redistricting order might shake up the balance of power,” he said. “They’re playing dirty.” Perhaps the most overt attempt to short-circuit mounting American Indian power in San Juan County came last June, when the county clerk, John David Nielson, removed the Navajo county commissioner candidate Willie Grayeyes from the primary ballot. Nielson based his decision on a complaint from Grayeyes’s Republican rival Wendy Black, who claimed that the Navajo candidate did not live in Utah but across the border in Arizona — a violation of state residency requirements. Those assertions were later found to be false by a federal judge and Grayeyes was returned to the ballot.

US politics are a joke.

We really tried improving things in the 60s, public financing of presidential elections, the Voting Rights Act, SCOTUS mandating better state level districting, but New Federalism and Nixon's SCOTUS picks set the stage for things to be as bad if not worse than before then.

this is what a concerted effort by a cabal of billionaires and millionaires working to remove power from the masses. the federalists have picked every republican judge and justice to protect coporations and the wealthy, party platforms have avoided seriously attacking the rich or their financing of elections and they run all the news with varying degrees of influence.

In a sane world when Great Recession 2 Electric Boogaloo happens around 2020 people would dump the Republican party for good but there's now a cult that will vote for them no matter what.

Friendly reminder that the book of Mormon says that native americans/darker skinned people are wicked instruments of Satan who're tasked with killing the holy white people. Friendlier reminder that these people basically run the state of Utah. This news doesn't surprise me.

I have a question for you. Why do the 2 most prosperous regions in the U.S,, the coastlines, vote blue every single time despite these areas having the highest concentration of wealth in the U.S.?

Because not every rich person is part of the Republican machine?

Because there's a LOT of people in those states, and a lot of not-rich people live there.

smaller pop states are easier to buy off. Look at oklahoma and Kansas, both are bleeding dry because a few rich people banded together and got them to dramatically slash taxes. It would be impossible to pass a constitutional amendment like oklahoma's in california because there's so many more people that would mobilize against it and could bring enough resources but in smaller states big money wins all the time.