Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by gscott | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

gscott

Many tribal lands don't have street addresses and in some states you have to have a residence with an address to vote.

View on HN

Yes this was an issue in a race I worked last cycle in Montana. Deliberately hostile SOS to benefit Rs

"SOS"?

"Secretary of state," I assume.

Secretary of State, i believe.

secretary of state sorry!

Reading the "How to Register to Vote" indicates otherwise. sosmt.gov/elections/vote/#how-to-register-to-vote

Specifically "You will need to provide a residence address or specific geographic location information from which your residence address may be determined. The residence address must be in the county in which you are registering."

This clearly allows someone without an "address" to register. In my experience identifying the Post Office on or near the tribe's land is plenty sufficient.

>or specific geographic location information from which your residence address may be determined.

The 'from which your residence address may be determined" reads, to me, like you still need an address. If you don't have a residence address, how can you provide information that determines where it is? It's nonexistent.

Still? IIRC North Dakota tried to make that the law but it was struck down.

The supreme court upheld the requirement that IDs have a street address, but some (maybe most or all, not sure) of the tribal authorities were able to assign street names and reissue IDs in time.

We should all move to gps coordinates

GPS coordinates of houses can change, while the address should stay the same.

Do you mean if the same house is moved to a new location on the same lot? I'm finding this difficult to imagine.

No, I mean the movement of earth underneath the house, tectonic plates etc. Earthquakes are one obvious example:

https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/7182/does-an-earthqu...

To be fair, the cited displacement of 8 ft (average for non-earthquake situations is 0 to 10cm) is within the typical margin of error of a GPS. That is, the coordinate change is small enough not to matter for “election” purposes.

Fine... GPS coordinates as of a specific date.

Addresses change a lot more often than gps coordinates. Streets get renamed, removed, or renumbered.

IIRC, this "need to have an address" is something that had adversely affected some nomadic people Inuits of Nunavut, Canada. I guess that many of them were, more or less, forced to adopt permanent residences and it destroyed their nomadic way of life. It's something that had never occurred to me until a read an article on it. I'm sure the problem is more pervasive that I know.

Is there a reason why they don't have a street address in 2019? Do they not want them or is it funding or something else?

Native American land laws are a disaster, and it’s not their fault. It’s a large contributor to poverty as well. I’m still not sure if that was an unintended or intended consequence of US govt treaties.

Why is this comment so downvoted? I'm not american, and I was also curious about why they don't have an adress.

As far as I know, only homeless people don't have an adress in Denmark.

EDIT: Great, now I'm downvoted as well! Huzzah!

Not native American, but grew up in a rural area (in Canada). My parents only got a "street address" a couple of years ago. There is a land location system going back over a century, but basically no one who didn't live on a farm new how to interpret it (say 98% of the population), and so it was basically useless as an address. The new "street address" is actually based on the land location, but it is formatted like a street address (house number, road name) rather than specifying quarter, section, township, range, meridian. Throughout my childhood, we usually just used a postal address, but in the last couple of decades, bank officials and the like have gotten more and more insistent on a physical address which we were basically unable to provide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Land_Survey

Where I grew up in Montana, we didn't have a street address. Only about 20 years ago did they name the road (after my grandfather) and assign addresses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com