Finding Home: How North Dakota Native Vote and the University of Chicago Data Science Institute are Protecting Indigenous Voting Rights

For many in the U.S., proving where you live is a simple matter of pulling out a driver’s license. But for thousands of Indigenous residents in North Dakota, that routine act has become a barrier to exercising one of democracy’s most fundamental rights, the right to vote.

North Dakota Native Vote (NDNV), in partnership with the University of Chicago Data Science Institute (DSI) and The 11th Hour Project, has worked to resolve this major barrier. Together, they’ve built a tool that turns a democratic obstacle into something solvable through the Find Your Address tool.

The Problem: An ID Law With Unequal Consequences

In 2017, North Dakota tightened its voter ID requirements, mandating that any valid form of identification must include the voter’s name, current residential address, and date of birth. On its face, this sounds straightforward. In practice, it created a serious issue for Native Reservation residents and communities.

Many homes on North Dakota’s reservations don’t use formally assigned street addresses. Reservations developed largely outside of the standard municipal address systems that govern most of the United States, and state systems are less likely to officially recognize the home locations of Indigenous residents living on reservations. As a result, many Native residents rely on post office boxes for their mail, which North Dakota determined do not count as a residential address for ID purposes.

The consequence of this legislation? Thousands of tribal IDs, the primary form of identification for many Native North Dakotans, were rendered invalid at the polls.

The state government offered a solution of sorts: contact your county’s 911 coordinator, who maintains a database of assigned addresses for every building in the county, including reservation homes. However, North Dakotan 911 coordinators often don’t have the bandwidth to help individual residents track down a single address in a timely way. For Indigenous communities already facing systemic barriers to civic participation, adding another bureaucratic phone call to the process deepened voting access issues.

The Partnership with North Dakota Native Vote

Founded in 2018, NDNV is the only state-based, Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building collective political power for North Dakota’s Native communities. NDNV works across reservation communities and urban areas through community organizing, civic education, leadership development, and public policy advocacy.

A central pillar of NDNV’s work is its Data Democracy program, which aims to integrate data systems into grassroots organizing structures to both help people vote today and to build a lasting, data-driven foundation for Indigenous political power. As NDNV Executive Director Nicole Donaghy has articulated, the goal is to “transform numbers into narratives that highlight inequities and drive meaningful transformation.”

NDNV connected with DSI in early 2024, with support from The 11th Hour Project, a program of the Schmidt Family Foundation that serves as a bridge between mission-driven organizations and technical expertise. DSI’s team, led by Susan Paykin, Senior Associate Director of Community-Centered Data Science, Jim Pivarski, DSI’s Staff Data Engineer, and David Jacobson, DSI’s Data and Engineering Manager, worked alongside NDNV’s Program Director (former) Devero Yellow Earring, Executive Director Nicole Donaghy, Deputy Director Kendyl Harrison, and Harris School of Public Policy Research Assistant Athmika Senthilkumar to scope and build the tools NDNV needed.

Importantly, equity and Indigenous data sovereignty, the principle that Indigenous communities have the right to govern the collection, ownership, and application of their own data, were central considerations at every stage of development.

The Solution: Find Your Address

NDNV’s Find Your Address tool is elegantly simple in concept, even if technically sophisticated under the hood.

At its core, the tool uses a technique called reverse geocoding. When someone opens the interactive map and clicks on their home’s location, the tool translates that click, a latitude/longitude coordinate, into a recognized residential street address from the official North Dakota 911 Address Database. No phone calls. No waiting. No bureaucracy. Just a map, a click, and an address.

Here’s how it works in practice:

Getting oriented. When you visit the tool, you have three ways to find your home on the map. You can search by zip code, county, or reservation name. You can tap the GPS button to let the tool locate you automatically. Or you can simply zoom in and navigate the map manually. Road networks and homes are highlighted to make navigation easier, so you’re not just staring at a blank canvas.

Working offline, too. One of the tool’s features is that it’s designed to function even in low-connectivity environments. Reservations and rural areas in North Dakota often have limited internet access. The DSI team built the tool using open-source software optimized for exactly these conditions, so even without a strong signal, the map still highlights roads and homes, making it possible to find your address regardless how strong your connection is.

Finding your address. Once you’ve located your home on the map, you click the dot representing your building. The tool immediately displays your residential street address, along with the source of that address, the exact information you’d need to update your ID and make it valid for Election Day (i.e., North Dakota Primary Election: June 9; U.S. Midterm Election: November 3).

It doesn’t stop there. Below the address, the tool provides a suite of additional voter resources. It shows your legislative district and links you to the North Dakota government page for your representatives. It connects to Ballotpedia, automatically copying your address so you can look up sample ballots and learn about candidates and issues on your ballot. And it links to North Dakota’s official Where Do I Vote tool, where you can find polling locations and ballot drop boxes, even copying your house number to your clipboard to speed up the process.

The tool also lists polling locations and drop boxes directly within its own interface, with directions from your home to each location. You don’t have to navigate between multiple websites to get a complete picture of how to vote.

Bigger Than a Tool: A Pilot for Indigenous Data Sovereignty

The Find Your Address tool is one piece of a larger initiative that NDNV is driving forward in partnership with DSI. Since its founding in 2018, NDNV has brought its “Get Out and Vote” organizing efforts to communities across the state to remove barriers to obtaining a ballot in North Dakota. DSI collaborated on the development and launch of the “Pledge to Vote” data collection infrastructure and accompanying elections information map, which allows NDNV to gather information directly from community members during Get Out the Vote organizing events, building NDNV’s own database of Indigenous voters, their concerns, and their barriers to participation.

This is crucial in the context of data sovereignty. Historically, data about Indigenous communities has often been collected by outside institutions, with the results often used for purposes that didn’t serve Native communities. NDNV’s approach reverses that dynamic. By building their own data infrastructure, NDNV retains ownership of what they learn and can use it to analyze how policies affect turnout, identify systemic barriers, and make the case for change on their own terms.

Collaborative Community Partnership

It would be easy to describe this collaboration as a tech organization helping a nonprofit. But that framing undercuts what’s actually happening here.

What NDNV and DSI built together is an example of community-centered data science at its best: technology developed with a community rather than for it, shaped by the people who understand both the problem and the stakes. Every feature in the Find Your Address tool reflects a real barrier that real people have faced: the offline functionality speaks to rural connectivity gaps, the source attribution speaks to the need for credible documentation, the integrated voting resources speak to the importance of lowering friction at every step of the voting process.

The partnership also demonstrates that the barriers facing Indigenous voters aren’t technical mysteries. They’re the result of systems that were built without Indigenous communities in mind. And with the right collaboration, the right tools, and a commitment to equity, those barriers can be addressed.

If you or someone you know is an Indigenous voter in North Dakota, you can find your residential address, check your legislative district, explore your sample ballot, and locate your polling place, all in one place with the Find Your Address tool.

To learn more about North Dakota Native Vote and their broader work empowering Indigenous communities, visit NDNV’s website.

This article draws on materials from North Dakota Native Vote and the University of Chicago Data Science Institute. The collaboration between NDNV and DSI was made possible in part by the 11th Hour Project, a program of the Schmidt Family Foundation.