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.Merrell.89 The Court did notquestion the fact that Indians were state citizens, but that was not enough toguarantee the right to vote:That Indians are entitled to the rights and privileges bestowed uponcitizens by the Federal and State constitutions, we do not question.But the right to vote is not vested absolutely in any citizen.It iswell settled that the right thus granted is subject to reasonablequalifications imposed by the state.90The Court rejected challenges under both the Fourteenth and FifteenthAmendments and found justification in the following:(1) That most persons residing on reservations are members of Indiantribes which have a considerable degree of sovereignty independent ofstate government; (2) That the Federal Government maintains a highdegree of interest in and responsibility for their welfare and thus haspotentially a substantial amount of influence and control over them,elk v.wilkins 177and (3) That they are much less concerned with paying taxes andotherwise being involved with state government and its local units,and are much less interested in it than are citizens generally.91The Court seemed to think that, on one hand, Indians had too little interest instate and local government (but why, then, did they want to vote?), while on theother hand they might have too much interest that resulted in  substantial controlof the county government and the expenditures of its funds in a group of citizenswho, as a class, had an extremely limited interest in its functions and very littleresponsibility in providing the financial support thereof. 92 In the end, it seemeda paradox of wanting too little or too much either of which, apparently, sufficedas grounds for exclusion.No other group of citizens was subject to such inconsis-tent grounds for disenfranchisement.The U.S.Supreme Court granted review,but while the appeal was pending, the Utah legislature repealed the statute.In New Mexico, there were several attempts to deny Indian citizens theright to vote based on residency and tax immunity issues.In Montoya v.Bolack,93the right of reservation Indian citizens to vote was challenged on residencygrounds.The New Mexico Supreme Court easily decided that reservation resi-dents were also state residents for the purpose of exercising the franchise.Yetthe Court also noted with some asperity that Navajos who resided on the reser-vation had secured an asymmetrical advantage with respect to off-reservationresidents:  [T]he anomalous situation [in which Indians can vote but are notsubject to control by elected officials] places the Navajo in a more favored posi-tion than other legal residents of the state. 94Thirteen years later in 1975, the state sought to deny Navajo people theright to vote in a local school board election and attendant bond issue based onthe tax immunization of trust land.The New Mexico Supreme Court againstruck down the state s claim on equal protection grounds.The Court went onto observe that the  taxation without representation canard, while superficiallyattractive, was empirically not well established in the case at bar, insomuch asthe bulk of the repayment of the bond indebtedness was to be derived fromcorporations that leased Navajo lands.95As these cases indicate, despite state citizenship and the grudging recogni-tion of a general right to vote, there was continued (though generally unsuc-cessful) resistance to the Indian right to vote on more limited grounds such asresidency and (property) tax-paying status.Yet even as that era came to a close,a new area of concern has come more and more to the fore.The new area doesnot involve the right to vote per se, but rather the myriad issues related to fairrepresentation and the establishment of voting districts at the school board,municipal, county, and state levels.178 individual indians and the constitutionSouth Dakota is a textbook example of this new zone of encounter involv-ing the status of Indians as full-fledged state citizens.The primary federal stat-ute designed to protect the voting franchise under the Fifteenth Amendment isthe Voting Rights Act of 1965.96 The statute was amended in 1975 to expresslyinclude Indians and to expand the preclearance provisions of Section 5 toinclude Shannon County and Todd County, located on the Pine Ridge andRosebud Sioux Reservations in South Dakota.97This was not well received in South Dakota.Attorney General WilliamJanklow referred to these changes in a formal letter to the (South Dakota) Secretaryof State as a  facial absurdity [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]