Key keywords: Native American voting rights, US Supreme Court, Voting Rights Act of 1965, lower court remand, North Dakota Native voting access, voter disenfranchisement, reservation polling locations, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, tribal electorate rights The U.S. Supreme Court issued a closely watched order this week remanding a high-stakes Native American voting rights lawsuit back to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for further review, avoiding an immediate ruling on the merits of a North Dakota voter ID law that lower courts previously found disproportionately harmed Indigenous voters. The case, first filed in 2018 by three North Dakota tribal nations and a group of Native voters, challenges the state’s 2017 voter identification requirement that mandates all voters present a state-issued ID with a valid residential street address to cast a ballot in person or by mail. For decades, most residents of North Dakota’s 12 federally recognized tribal reservations have used P.O. boxes for mail delivery, as many reservation roads lack official street names and residential address assignments from local governments. Lower court records show that nearly 20% of eligible Native voters in North Dakota did not have an ID that met the 2017 requirement ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, compared to less than 2% of non-Native voters in the state. A federal district court ruled in 2020 that the law violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group, and ordered the state to allow tribal members to use IDs with P.O. box addresses to vote. The 8th Circuit upheld that ruling in 2022, prompting state officials to appeal to the Supreme Court. In its order remanding the case, the Supreme Court cited its 2021 ruling in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, which established a stricter set of factors that lower courts must use to evaluate Section 2 claims, requiring plaintiffs to prove that a challenged voting rule imposes a “substantial” burden on minority voters and that the rule is inconsistent with “equal opportunity” to participate in the political process, rather than just showing a disparate impact on a protected group. Voting rights advocates warn that the remand will make it significantly harder for tribal plaintiffs to prevail in the case, as the Brnovich standard has already led to the dismissal of dozens of voting rights lawsuits across the country since 2021. The outcome of the remanded case will have national implications, as at least 11 other states with large Native American populations have implemented similar voter ID rules, and tribal communities across the U.S. continue to face systemic barriers to voting, including limited polling locations on reservations, long wait times, and unreliable mail delivery on tribal lands. Native voters have historically had a 10 to 15 percentage point lower turnout rate than non-Native voters in federal elections, according to data from the National Congress of American Indians, and advocates say restrictive voting laws are a primary driver of that gap.