MHA Nation chairman voters oust one incumbent for November election

The top two candidates move toward a general election in November with the winner to serve as the new MHA Nation chairman.

Unofficial results from the Sept. 22 returns just after 8:30 p.m. showed Fox with 590 votes followed by Williams with 550. Mayer trailed with 540 total votes. Eight candidates ran in the primary election for MHA Nation chairman. A total of 2,774 votes were cast.

Early results showed Mayer in second place over Williams with 489 votes to his 458. That gap flipped to Williams after Four Bears returns were counted.

While late-evening votes were tallied, the morning voting experience in at least two segments started off a bit rocky. Bird Ford and her daughter were among the first three voters at the Four Bears voting site. “Our voting experience was a bit chaotic,” she told Buffalo’s Fire after unofficial results were counted.

When they arrived at 8 a.m., shortly after the polling site opened, the voting machine at Four Bears malfunctioned and they had to wait at least 30-minutes to vote. Ford said they were directed to sign a voter affidavit, leave a picture of their ID and then vote with a paper ballot. At that point she said they were instructed by poll workers to manually deposit the ballot in a right-side pocket of the machine, “you had to lean down almost to the floor to put it in,” she said.

After they left the site, Ford called the site again to confirm their ballot was properly counted. Ford said another polling worker told her the ballots were deposited in the wrong place. At that point, they had to insist on a resolution to have their ballots counted.

Ford said poll workers told them voting at Four Bears would continue and that, when polls closed, the machines would be shut down, resetting their electronic readers to zero, and workers would then manually count the paper ballots inside the machine.hour

Similar voting machine malfunctions also occurred in Parshall and Twin Buttes. Payden Sorensen arrived around 8:20 a.m. at Memorial Hall in Twin Buttes, where the voting machines also weren't working. Poll workers did not ask him to sign a voter affidavit and told him they would take care of his ballot, which was placed in a lock box. At least two other completed voter ballots were handled the same way during that time. A poll worker told Buffalo’s Fire that the machine in Twin Buttes was down for about 1.5 hours.

Meanwhile, as Williams sat in third place, Ford watched with anticipation to see what results Four Bears would bring.

“We felt responsible in a way because Four Bears was so late and that’s because they had to count them and the reason was because they were doing them one by one,” Ford said.

Williams won Four Bears with 92 votes and a place in the general election against Fox.

The winner in the November election will replace Chairman Mark N. Fox, who has served three four-year terms.

Election results were counted and released at the Four Bears Casino in New Town, North Dakota on the Fort Berthold Reservation. MHA voters also picked council seats for representatives from Northeast and South segments, with Mervin Packineau netting 60% of votes in Parshall and Cory Spotted Bear with 57% in Twin Buttes; both won their races by majority, according to unofficial results.

In Four Bears, Robert White received the most votes, finishing with 44% of the total. Yvette Young Bear took second place with 96 votes, ahead of Marcus Levings, who finished with 94 votes. Young Bear will face White in the general election for the Four Bears council seat.

The tribal election board is expected to release official results within three days.

Heavy website traffic on the MHA Nation election site limited the canvass live stream to YouTube.