Official results of Tuesday's primary election on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation won't be released until today, but it looks like Russell Means will be on the November ballot for Oglala Sioux Tribal president, along with either Theresa Two Bulls or current President John Yellow Bird Steele.

All three are familiar names to Pine Ridge voters. In 2002, Means and Yellow Bird Steele finished first and second in the primary election, with Two Bulls - then tribal vice-president - finishing third. Means, a well-known American Indian Movement activist, later lost to Yellow Bird Steele, who is now completing his fifth term in office.

Means has run for tribal president several times, including in 1974, when he lost the election to Dick Wilson. Cecelia Fire Thunder defeated Means in 2004.

Two Bulls, who is the first Native American woman elected to the South Dakota Legislature, served as tribal vice-president and tribal prosecutor and was the tribe's secretary for eight years. If elected she would be the second woman to serve as president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

With about 400 challenge votes yet to be verified, tribal election commission chairman Sidney Witt said Wednesday that a preliminary count showed Means received 845 votes, Two Bulls 739 votes, and Steele 656 votes. The top two vote-getters will advance to the Nov. 4 general election.

The challenge votes will change those numbers. As Witt explained, tribal members who vote are added to voter lists that are distributed to all polling places. If a person's name is not on the voter list, he or she can still cast a "challenge vote," where the ballot is sealed in an envelope marked with the voter's name. Tribal officials later check those names against tribal membership rolls to make sure the person is eligible to vote. If so, the vote is counted.

"We don't have a pre-registration type procedure," Witt explained. Still, "Four hundred challenge votes is a lot. … I guess I should be glad that many people at the last minute all of a sudden wanted to vote."

Witt suspects that many of those voters may be young people who weren't old enough to vote in 2006. Overall voter turnout was low, though final numbers weren't available Wednesday.

"I can't even speculate why," Witt said.

The vote count also is being verified manually. "We don't have computers; we do it all by hand," he said.

Contact Heidi Bell Gease at 394-8419 or heidi.bell@rapidcityjournal.com