Buffalo County, South Dakota

Ten years after its enactment in 1965, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to include American Indians and expanded the reach of the special preclearance provisions of Section 5 to two counties in South Dakota, Shannon and Todd, home to the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian Reservations. Despite the clear federal mandate, William Janklow, the South Dakota Attorney General at the time, derided the 1975 law as a "facial absurdity" and advised the Secretary of State not to comply with the Act. As a result, from 1976 until 2002, South Dakota enacted more than six hundred statutes and regulations effecting elections or voting in Shannon and Todd Counties, but submitted fewer than ten to the Department of Justice for approval under Section 5 of the VRA. One of the most blatant schemes to disfranchise Indian voters in South Dakota was employed in Buffalo County with a population of approximately 2000 people, 83% of whom are Indian, primarily members of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe. Under the decades-old plan for electing the three-member county commission, nearly all of the Indian population -- some 1500 people -- were packed into one district. Whites, though only 17% of the population, controlled the remaining two districts and thus the county government. The system was not only in violation of the constitutional requirement of one person, one vote, but had been implemented and maintained in order to dilute the Indian vote and ensure white control of county government. Tribal members, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project brought suit in 2003 alleging that the districting plan was malapportioned and had been drawn purposefully to discriminate against Indian voters. The case was settled by a consent decree in which the county admitted that its plan was discriminatory and agreed to submit to federal supervision of its future plans under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act through January 2013.