Minnehaha County backed away from placing ballot dropboxes around Sioux Falls after opposition from Republican mayor Paul TenHaken. Lincoln County decided it didn’t need the…
43 search results for “native american voting rights”
Rather than find anything original to say about the murder of George Floyd, the SDGOP spin blog runs the weekly propaganda pieces from its incumbents,…
The Hill reports that South Bend mayor and Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is using Native American Day to propose a wide-ranging plan for boosting tribal…
A friend forwards me what appears to be an opinion column from Steve Ollerich in a recent South Dakota Cattlemen’s magazine. The s-bomb in his…
I went to court yesterday, said nothing dumb, didn’t torque off the judge (not noticeably, at least), and sat next to Marty Jackley without starting a fistfight. That felt like four wins right there.
In my first visit to a federal courtroom, suing to overturn an unconstitutional ban on out-of-state contributions to South Dakota ballot question committees, I sat in front of the bar with the following cast (as seated from right to left, as viewed by Judge Charles Kornmann):
- my lawyer, Jim Leach, who came to Rapid City over forty years ago to work for the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee, and now is representing my ballot question committee and myself in SD Voice and Cory Heidelberger v. Kristi Noem, Jason Ravnsborg, and Steve Barnett;
- myself, political blogger, educational technologist (happily burning a personal day from work for this legal excursion), ballot question activist;
- Marty Jackley, establishment Republican, former Attorney General, and frequent target of criticism on this blog, representing a host of mostly money-driven plaintiffs in a separate but equal lawsuit, South Dakota Newspaper Association, South Dakota Retailers Association, South Dakota Broadcasters Association, South Dakota Chamber Ballot Action Committee, Thomas Barnett, Jr., and Americans for Prosperity v. Steve Barnett and Jason Ravnsborg;
- Ryan Morrison, a Kentucky attorney from a Washington, D.C., conservative non-profit who said nothing during the proceedings save some eager whisperings to his co-counsel Jackley;
- Stacy Hegge, Assistant Attorney General, fellow proud SDSU grad, saddled with defending the state against my counsel and against the man who was her boss just five months ago;
- Kea Warne, director of the Division of Elections for the Secretary of State, dragged from Pierre to miss her high-school-senior son’s tennis matches (Ryan won all three of his singles and two of his three doubles).
Here’s what I saw and heard and thought.
Indigenous voting rights group Four Directions did solid work fighting voter suppression and getting out the Native America vote on the Standing Rock Reservation in North…
With the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight, the closest to the final bell since 1953, when the Soviets lit their first fusion-based bomb‚…
To warm up for whatever voter suppression efforts part flunktionary Steve Barnett has in mind to mark his time in the Secretary of State’s office,…
American Indian voting rights group Four Directions is “working day and night in Indian Country” to protect the Native vote… but their server isn’t. Ever…
The Supreme Court decided 6–2 this week, without rookie Justice Kavanaugh’s help, not to wade into the battle over North Dakota’s new stricter voter ID…
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