Why isn’t it a crime for a state government to suppress the Indian vote?

It’s a story as old as the colonial frontier, where state and local governments did everything they could to cheat Native Nations. They only honored treaties or federal laws if and when they were sued in court and lost.

These systemic problems keep happening because states face no consequences for bad-faith actions.

There are many examples, but today we look at a recent voter suppression case in South Dakota. The law is clear, yet the state chooses to be willfully ignorant of legitimate grievances.