RONAN -- They lost a Native voter. "He's large. He's really dark. And he has a really booming voice," said Ruth Quequesah, a volunteer vote coordinator on the Flathead Indian Reservation who has worked for months to register voters and get them to the polls Tuesday.

Quequesah felt the citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes was treated unfairly at the polls because he was Native. And when an election judge in Polson failed to offer him a provisional ballot, the man left the polling place upset. He never did return to vote.

It was just the sort of situation Get-Out-the-Vote volunteers hoped to avoid. And it was the reason students at the University of Montana's Indian Law Clinic canvassed Montana's seven reservations on Election Day with nearly 50 lawyers and student volunteers.

A volunteer assigned to the Polson site was traveling between polls when the tribal citizen failed to present proper identification.

The Indian Law Clinic students' effort to protect Native voters was part of a national plan organized by the Native American Bar Association and the National Congress of American Indians, said Eli Parker of the Indian Law Clinic.

The three most common barriers preventing Native people from voting are restrictive state election laws, poorly prepared election officials and misinformed voters.

Native voters received increased attention from political candidates this fall, particularly in tight elections. And considerable effort went into making sure their votes were counted.

On Election Day, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Piersol issued a restraining order against Republican poll workers who were charged with intimidating Native voters on South Dakota's Yankton Reservation.

Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., was counting on the Native vote in his race against Republican John Thune.

"The Flathead Reservation isn't as contentious as other reservations," said Rhonda Swaney of the Indian Law Clinic. "We're a smaller problem than other reservations. We're not as visible."

Yet Quequesah and Anita Big Springs, a coordinator with Native Action, a nonprofit Get-Out-the-Vote organization, could rattle off a list of tribal citizens who met "antagonistic" election judges on Tuesday.

In Lake County, with 22 precincts and 88 election judges, there are less than a handful of Native judges although tribal members make up nearly 25 percent of the population.

If the ratio was balanced, there would be at least one Native election judge in every precinct, said Big Springs. She said complaints to the Lake County election administrator have fallen on deaf ears.

But that hasn't stopped poll watchers from taking a seat at precincts to put Native people at ease, said Big Springs. "Through this process, we've made major inroads."

Months of registering voters and getting them to the polls paid off. In Lake County, which encompasses most of the Flathead Reservation, some 2,200 new voters were registered. Quequesah and Big Springs said their 60 volunteers alone registered about half those new voters since September.