Who Called the Sheriff? Pine Ridge Voter Turnout Plummets, then Rebounds
Sheriff in Pine Ridge voting-office doorway Billmoyers.com and Indian Country Media Network published versions of this article in 2014 with additional photographs by Jesse Short Bull . For more on topics like this, see my book, American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle.... V oters walking into the polling place would see the sheriff there and veer off,” said Donna Semans, the Rosebud Sioux field coordinator for Four Directions voting-rights group. “If I was driving them to the polls, they’d spot the sheriff’s vehicle out front and tell me, ‘No way. I’m not going in there.’” Semans runs Four Directions’ get-out-the-vote, or GOTV, operation on the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota. Since mid-October, her team has transported voters from around the 2.1-million acre reservation to a polling place in Pine Ridge Village. There they can register and cast a no-excuse absentee ballot ahead of Election Day. Then one day, the county sher