After turning out to vote in record numbers in 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Native Americans are now one of the biggest targets of Republican-backed voter suppression efforts in states where their votes mattered the most.

Republicans in states with significant Native populations like Arizona, Kansas, Montana and more have enacted new laws that limit voter access in ways that disproportionately impact Native voters. Imposing strict time limits on correcting a mail-in ballot, prohibiting third-party ballot collection, implementing strict voter identification requirements and making it harder to pay for election resources all negatively impact Native Americans in these states, largely due to specific circumstances on reservations where many of them live.

The laws the state legislatures are passing are lethal to every Native American living in those states, said OJ Semans, the founder of the Native voting rights group Four Directions and an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. Such legislation, he said, is going to knock us back 10 years after what weve been working through for the last 18 to 20 years to get more and more Native Americans to participate in elections.

The current GOP-backed voter suppression push comes after Native voters emerged as the key voting bloc in states across the country in determining the outcome of elections for president, Senate and the House. The new wave of laws seeks to take advantage of the existing barriers Native voters face by making them even higher than before.

Native Americans have historically faced significant obstacles to the vote. The U.S. government interpreted the 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War to grant Black Americans full citizenship rights, to exclude Native peoples from citizenship. Native women were not granted the right to vote in 1920, because Native citizenship was not formally recognized until Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924. Even then, voting rights still remained elusive in some areas.

It wasnt until 1962 when New Mexicos laws blocking Native voting fell. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 also provided important protections for Native voting rights.

But barriers remain. In 2020, the Native American Rights Fund commissioned a study of obstacles to the Native vote through a series of field hearings and interviews with Native Americans across the country. The report found that they continue to face a wide array of first generation barriers to voting actual barriers to voting that are in fact preventing them from exercising their rights to vote and stripping them of their political power.

These barriers stem from a host of problems, including lack of adequate translation, underfunded county election departments or even hostile local election officials, unconventional mailing addresses and mail processes, and perhaps most importantly, distance from government resources and high rates of poverty that make travel challenging.

Many of the new voting laws are damaging to Native voters even if they dont, on the surface, seem to single them out.

Its not just policies and laws that specifically target Native voters, of which there are plenty, but some laws and policies that seem neutral have an adverse effect on Native communities, said Jonathan Diaz, counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit involved in voting rights lawsuits on behalf of Native communities.