Gorman was describing a highly localized, narrow slice of the electorate -- about 60,000 voting-age adults living on the reservation. But Native Americans tend to vote for Democrats.
And in a closely fought state, the votes of a handful of Navajo could be decisive.
In 2004, President Bush won a neighboring state, New Mexico, by just 6,000 ballots, and his 537-vote margin in Florida four years earlier prompted both parties to develop finely tuned get-out-the-vote procedures designed to enlist every voter they could.
Republicans had great success enacting new laws after 2004, winning voter identification requirements in Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and the city of Albuquerque as well as the Arizona law, while adding the voter registration restrictions in Ohio and Florida.
In some states, the legal wrangling has prompted creative efforts to guard against constitutional challenges.
Missouri has deployed mobile units in vans to issue identification to the elderly, responding to complaints that photo ID is costly or hard to obtain for some voters.
Wisconsin's Democratic governor has vetoed voter identification legislation approved by the Republican-led Legislature, and the Michigan Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on the constitutionality of a 1996 state law that has never been enforced but would require photo ID at the polls.
Pennsylvania's Republican-led Legislature approved a voter identification requirement, but it was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell.
Across the country, the strategy on each side is being engineered by national groups that say they are nonpartisan but that are ideologically aligned with either the Republican or Democratic parties.
The leading conservative group is the American Center for Voting Rights, an organization created last year that lobbied for many of the new laws and now coordinates the legal strategy to defend them from challenges. The group's primary lawyer is Mark "Thor" Hearne, a St. Louis-based veteran of the Florida recount in the 2000 presidential race who served as national election law counsel for President Bush's 2004 reelection campaign.
The opposing side is somewhat less centralized, with cases being brought by several groups, among them People for the American Way, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). These groups share strategy and have formed a coalition called the National Network on State Election Reform.
