Indian plaintiffs: Fremont County delaying vote

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) – Indian plaintiffs in a voting rights lawsuit say Fremont County officials are to blame for refusing to hold county commissioner elections on schedule this year.

“The county commission now wants people to think that we are trying to keep people from voting in an election this fall, and that's not the case,” said Emma Lucille McAdams, a member of Eastern Shoshone Tribe who has run unsuccessfully for the county commission.

In response to the lawsuit brought by McAdams and other members of Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes, U.S. District Judge Alan B. Johnson of Cheyenne ruled in April that the county's system of at-large voting violates federal law by diluting the American Indian vote.

The county includes most of the Wind River Indian Reservation, home to both the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes.

Johnson ordered the county to present him with a voting plan laying out single-member commission districts by June 30.

Julie A. Freese, the county clerk, said Wednesday that there's no way the county could devise new districts and put county commission candidates on the ballot in time for the Aug. 17 primary election. She has said the county will likely have to hold special primary and general elections for commissioners in October and December in order to get them seated by January.

The county's lawyers asked Johnson last week to rewrite his ruling in the case to allow the county to propose a different, unspecified voting system other than single-member districts.

Lawyers representing McAdams and the other Indian plaintiffs filed papers on Wednesday telling Johnson the oppose the county's request to present any voting plan other than single-member districts.

“The law is pretty clear that the court is required to use all single-member districts unless there is some overwhelming reason not to do so,” said lawyer Laughlin McDonald, head of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project.

J. Scott Detamore, a lawyer with the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver who represents Fremont County, filed papers last week claiming that Johnson doesn't have authority to tell the county what the new voting plan should be or to require that it have single-member districts.

Detamore on Wednesday said the county is asking Johnson to amend his order “because they may want to propose an alternative plan, seems pretty self-evident.”

Detamore said Fremont County wants to expedite the process as much as possible and intends to have new commissioners seated by January.

Plaintiff Gary Collins, a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, said he ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Fremont County Commission in the 1980s. He said the plaintiffs have given the county maps and demographic information it could use to craft even single-member districts.

Collins and other plaintiffs are concerned that the state has collected far more in severance taxes from energy production on the Wind River Indian Reservation than the tribes have received back in state and county services in recent decades.

He pointed out that there's no library on the reservation, while there are libraries in towns around the county.

“We feel that we pay in, but don't get the equal representation on the dollars that are going back,” Collins said.