Advocates work to get Native American voters registered in the key state of Arizona

PHOENIX — Alta Edison was born on top of a hill.

It's a story she told her grandchildren. And it's an important detail as to why at first she couldn't vote.

"Since the beginning, she had challenges to vote," Ashley Edison, 23 and a member of the Navajo Nation, said about her grandmother. "She wasn't able to get an ID because she didn't have a birth certificate. ... She didn't have an address because their home was a PO Box."

In a coffee shop outside Phoenix, Edison proudly pointed to her grandmother in photographs. For more than four decades, up until her death in 2021, Alta Edison worked as an elections coordinator and was seen as a beacon for voting access, especially within the tribes in and near Coconino County.

The county has since renamed an elections office in Edison's honor, and officials credited her with helping bring out a record number of voters in 2020.

Now, ahead of 2024 elections, voting advocates in the swing state are aiming to boost voter registration strategies for Native voters, as they still face many of the same barriers that Alta Edison worked to break down.

Barriers to voting for Native Americans vary from tribe to tribe, but organizers say some tend to recur, including: address issues on rural reservation land, problems recognizing tribal identification cards, language barriers and distrust of government.

Alta Edison would help translate voting and registration forms into Navajo and be present on reservation land to help navigate ID and address issues.

In the fall of 2020, Ashley Edison spent most of her time with her grandmother. She did voter registration training to help register new Navajo voters and would wake up before dawn to table registrations and then ballot drop-off locations.

"It