South Dakota: 7th day of Indian trial
When Elsie Meeks was the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 1998, she said the campaign office got a series of telephone complaints that the party had chosen an American Indian for that position.
"They would call and say, 'We don't understand why Bernie has her on the ticket when we can't go onto her reservation and vote,'" Meeks testified in a voting rights trial on Thursday. ...
The judge must decide whether the American Indian population is too high in District 27 or if the state's lawyers are correct when they say that that high of an Indian population is needed to elect state lawmakers who are Indian.
Lawyers from the South Dakota attorney general's office cite low voter turnout on reservations for state elections and a young population that, in all racial groups, tends to vote in small numbers. ...
Both the state and the ACLU have expert witnesses who have examined voting patterns on a precinct-by-precinct basis. The experts have reached different conclusions about voting patterns of the two races.
ACLU lawyers argued in a brief that their expert and the state's expert both found "overwhelming" cohesion among Indian voters. They argued that various forms of statistical analysis of 2002 elections in District 26 found that 86 percent of Indian voters voted the same way.
The ACLU argued that the state's expert incorrectly considered ballot issue elections in his analysis. Those elections do not have candidates and should not be studied to find voting patterns, the ACLU argued. -- ACLU finishes case in voting rights trial (Rapid City Journal)