If you’ve never seen a smoke signal rise over the Capitol dome, you ain’t never watched a Nevada politician try to fix a problem he just found out he helped create. The Secretary of State, Francisco Aguilar, descended upon Carson City with a host of handlers, assistants, and earnest expressions to listen.
Which, in political arithmetic, is worth about as much as a gold rush after the gold is gone.
Let us not be unfair. Mr. Aguilar, a man of commendable shortness and uncommonly clean boots for a politician, came to meet with Nevada’s tribal communities—not to sell them snake oil, mind you, but to hear their woes about that most elusive creature–the vote. It’s strange how voting, a task no more complicated than licking an envelope, becomes a quest of epic proportions when conducted across tribal lands.
Stacey Montooth–a name as solid and reliable as tufa– explained that many Native citizens must drive an hour and a half to vote. That’s an hour and a half one way, mind you—not including the time spent waiting in line behind a rancher, two Jehovah’s Witnesses, and that fellow who thinks every election’s rigged unless his cousin wins.
To fix this, the State did a marvelous thing–it launched what it calls the Effective Absenteeism System for Elections—EASE–for short and not by coincidence. The contraption allows tribal citizens to cast votes from the comfort of their homes—or at least the nearest broadband signal strong enough to load a webpage without collapsing from exhaustion.
Sixty-one voters from eleven tribes used it, which may not sound like much, but out in the windy West–that’s a landslide.
They also set up three new polling stations, bringing the total to twenty across tribal lands. The act, which required at least four meetings, five press releases, and one ceremonial ribbon-cutting, led to a 36 percent increase in tribal voter turnout.
Politicians, ever fond of a good number that makes them look busier than they are, pointed to this with wide eyes and thunderous declarations.
“It was an aha moment,” Mr. Aguilar proclaimed.
And what a sound an “aha” makes echoing through the marble halls of bureaucracy! It is, in fact, the sound of a man discovering that Native Americans also wish to vote—something any schoolchild with a history book could’ve told you.
Ever eager to show his sincerity, the Secretary has launched a listening tour among all 28 tribes, bands, and colonies in Nevada. It will require a vast supply of folding chairs, maps, coffee, and patience. But if democracy must travel by horse cart and iPad, then so be it.
Lastly, in the name of “voter roll integrity,” which is to say, pruning the names of those who moved, died, or wandered off—Mr. Aguilar inactivated some 37,000 voters and removed 160,000 registrations statewide. It startled the local press, who had assumed voter rolls were as eternal and unchanging as the Sierra Nevadas.
All told–the endeavor is admirable, though I daresay if politicians had to ride a mule for three days to cast their vote, we’d see reform faster than a gambler folding on a bad hand. So, how many politicians does it take to send a smoke signal?
Just one—provided he has a camera crew, a publicist, a well-placed quote about democracy, and a Wi-Fi signal strong enough to carry it to Twitter.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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