Navajo chapter, board primary
election lacks candidates

By Karen Francis
Diné Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — The polls opened at 6 a.m. for the Navajo Nation’s primary election Tuesday. By 10:30 p.m., Navajo Election Administration staff was still at the Sports Center in Window Rock awaiting the call-in results from four more chapters. At 2 a.m. today results were still being counted.

The primary election was held at the 110 Navajo chapters for chapter president, vice president and secretary/treasurer, grazing and land board members, school board members and five out of 10 of the Board of Election supervisors.

A widescreen television flashed the unofficial results from the chapters as election staff gathered the numbers. The results do not become official until certified by the Board of Election Supervisors.

At most of the chapters, the machines tabulate the unofficial results and poll workers phone in the numbers to the NEA staff at the sports center. In some cases, workers may have to count ballots manually.

Today, the election administration staff will be counting challenged votes, NEA director Edison Wauneka said.

Wauneka said that he did not think that voter turnout for the primary reached 50 percent, but that the election administration is working to get at least 50 percent voter turnout for the general election on Nov. 4.

“I think we have good turn out for a primary election,” he said.
He added that the 2004 election was the first time in history that the voter turnout for the election for chapter officials was over 50 percent.

“So we’d like to be able to do the same thing for the 2008 elections,” Wauneka said.Because the NEA did not purge voters after the election in 2006, total voter registration is over 110,000 this year — which may make it even more difficult to reach the 50 percent mark.

However, Wauneka said it can be done if the NEA receives help from the president’s office and the speaker’s office in promoting voting among the Navajo people. Get-out-the-vote efforts from those offices helped push the voter turnout to over 50 percent in 2004.

For this year’s primary, there were only minor problems, Wauneka said.

“I think staff did a really good job in making sure that poll workers were trained correctly (and) machines were maintained. We had very few problems,” he said.

While there were few technical problems, one of the main concerns of the NEA is the small amount of candidates seeking local chapter office. Wauneka said that 98 positions had no candidates at all and about 80 percent of the positions up for election had only one or two candidates. The primary election narrows down the candidates to the top two vote-getters for each of the local officials’ positions.

Those 98 positions that no one applied for will be re-opened for application from Aug. 6 to Aug. 19. The $200 application fee will still apply, Wauneka said.

Because of the lack of candidates for some positions and with most positions only drawing one or two candidates, the NEA is questioning the need for a primary election for chapter officials.

“If 80 percent of the ballots are going to look the same for the general election, there’s a lot of waste of money that we spend,” Wauneka said. The NEA would have to work with the Navajo Nation Council to make changes for the chapter officials’ election.

Because the election for Navajo Nation President and Council delegates, which occurs two years after the chapter officials’ election, draws more candidates, those elections would still need primaries, Wauneka said.

Another concern for the NEA centers on the approval of an emergency appropriation to increase the pay for poll workers from about $65 to $120. Council delegate Young Jeff Tom, Mariano Lake/Smith Lake, sponsored the legislation seeking funds for the NEA to pay for the pay increase and the NEA is waiting to see if the president will sign the legislation.

With the U.S. President general election and the Navajo Nation’s general election for chapter officials held on the same day, competition for poll workers will be high, which makes the pay increase necessary.

“It’s hard to recruit when the counties pay more,” Wauneka said.