Ongoing negotiations between tribal leaders and Colorado officials may chart a new path for automatically registering Native voters and growing voter rolls nationwide. But first the state is having to confront a legacy of mistrust.
Colorado officials are now proposing to go further. In 2023, the state adopted legislation to try something that’s never been done in this country: automatically register tribal members to vote in U.S. elections.
The program, if implemented, would enable tribes to share their membership lists with Colorado elections officials, who’d then use that information to register every eligible person to vote, while giving them a chance to opt out. Since Colorado already mails ballots to every registered voter, this would necessarily mean getting ballots into the hands of more Native people. “We’ve made real steps forward, and we’re going to continue,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told me recently. “We always try to push the envelope.”
And yet, Cloud is also keenly concerned that the program could make her community more vulnerable. For U.S. election officials to automatically register tribal members to vote, the tribes would need to share certain vital information about their members, such as full name, address, and date of birth. Cloud is hesitant to hand this data over to a state that has, over a long history that she knows too well, been an agent of violence.
