Seamans said his organization is in the process of having conversations with tribal leaders and informing them about the new law to boost the number of polling sites on reservations ahead of the 2020 election. Under the new law, tribes have until July 3, the first Friday in July, to submit their requests to their respective county clerks.
Allowing voting on reservations is key to boosting the Native vote, because people often don't have the means to travel 50 or 100 miles to the nearest polling site, Seamans said. Four Directions conducted a survey before they filed their lawsuit and found that members of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe had to travel as many as 70 miles to the nearest polling location, while some wealthy Lake Tahoe residents only had to travel 5 miles to their nearest satellite polling location.
"In our survey, we were able to identify that Natives were in the majority in the poverty level, and their vehicles were not trustworthy to travel long distances or even short distances unless there was some type of emergency," Seamans said.
That's something that the Nevada State Democratic Party is taking into consideration as well as it plans caucus sites. The party had caucus sites on reservations in 2016 including at the Washoe Housing Authority in Gardnerville; the Human Development Center in Owyhee; the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribal Building; the Walker River Paiute Tribe Community Center in Schurz; the Yomba Shoshone Tribal Gym; and the Pyramid Lake Junior and Senior High School in Nixon and will do so again in 2020.
The party will also offer early voting at four different locations on reservations, at the Las Vegas Indian Center, the Wadsworth Community Building on the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe's reservation, the Hungry Valley Recreation Center and at the Washoe Housing Authority.
The polling location is only one part of the equation, though. The other is getting people to actually show up. But Seamans is optimistic. Data provided by Four Directions shows that early votes from precincts in Nixon in 2016 increased 781 percent over those cast in 2012, and Election Day votes from those precincts increased by 180 percent between the two elections, while overall Washoe County voter turnout only increased by 113.7 percent.
"The data shows that the satellite offices bring in new voters," Seamans said. "The old voters will continue to come, but over and over the data has shown it produces new voters."
Earlier this year, Teresa Melendez and her husband Brian Melendez had an idea. They were watching a tumultuous political battle playing out on a national level and realized that they wanted the Native community to have a seat at the table. They brought the idea to Sarah Mahler, chair of the Washoe County Democratic Party, who helped them draft and submit bylaws for a new Native American caucus to the state Democratic Party in June.
By October, the state party central committee had overwhelmingly approved them and gave the caucus a seat on the party's executive board.
"It's never been done before," Brian Melendez said.
For Teresa Melendez, it seemed like the natural thing to do. The tribes are a political powerhouse in her home state of Michigan.
"I was blown away when I moved to Nevada," she said. "The tribes do not have political influence here."
People only recognize the tribes, she said, when they have money and numbers. That means it's usually the big gaming tribes that have earned the lion's share of the attention.
But the couple is hoping to change that. Their short term goals include recruiting Native seats in the state central committee and boosting voter turnout for the 2020 presidential election. Longer term goals include building a bench of Natives interested in running for local, state and national offices, Teresa Melendez said.
And they're not the only ones. Tribal leaders and Native organizers across the state are ramping up in a number of ways from voter registration drives and caucus trainings to a presidential candidate forum in an effort to turn out the biggest Native vote ever in 2020.
"It seems to be the consensus that we are organizing in our pockets with the same ideas, the same goals toward having the Native voice heard, and then we're starting to connect across the state and across the country now because we are all feeling and experiencing similar things," said Krause, who has drafted the bylaws and recruited an executive board to form a Clark County Native caucus. "So it's kind of happening simultaneously, but now everything is linking up."
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