By Amanda Ojeda
For the 246 years of American history, the unfortunate trend of racial and ethnic minorities being underrepresented and diminished in national politics, has prevailed. Additionally, landmarks in representation can best be seen only in the past few decades. However, our 117th Congress is setting new records marking how far we’ve come to combat this issue.
With 23% of voting members of the House and Senate coming from racial or ethnic minorities, not only is the 117th Congress the most racially diverse in history, it has achieved something never seen before – full US Indigenous representation. Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola’s election to the US House of Representatives marked the first time a Native American, Native Alaskan, and Native Hawaiian are all members of the House. She is also the first Alaskan Native to be elected to the House of Representatives for Alaska.
The special election of Alaska was the state’s first test of rank-choice voting. Rank-choice voting is when voters don’t select only one candidate, instead, they select all four and rank them in order of preference. The usefulness to this method is that if no one wins the majority vote, the next step would be to eliminate the “last place” candidate and redistribute their votes among the others.
When 48 candidates campaigned to secure one of the four spots on the ballot, Peltola finalized the primaries at 4th place. However, by the final count she rose to being the leading candidate beating former Gov. Sarah Palin.
Lani Teves, an associate professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa told NPR that Indigenous people in the United States have been disenfranchised on many levels throughout history, so this election is monumental.
The next step for Peltola is to win reelection in November. During her victory on August 16th she tweeted “It is a GOOD DAY…We’ve won tonight, but we’re still going to have to hold this seat in November.”
