In 1988, the Cherokee Registration Committee approved new guidelines for tribal membership that mirrored Swimmer's previous executive order regarding voting requirements. On September 12, 1992, the Cherokee Nation Council unanimously passed, with one member absent, an act requiring all enrolled members of the Cherokee Nation to have a CDIB card. Mankiller had reaffirmed "Swimmer's order on CDIBs and voting." Principal Chief Mankiller signed and approved the legislation. From that point on, Cherokee Nation citizenship was granted only to individuals descended directly from an ancestor on the "Cherokee by blood" rolls of the Dawes Commission Rolls. This completed the disfranchisement of the Cherokee Freedmen descendants. Activism of the 1940s–2000s In the 1940s, more than 100 descendants of freedmen from the Wallace Roll, Kern-Clifton Roll, and the Dawes Rolls formed the Cherokee Freedmen's Association. The organization filed a petition with the Indian Claims Commission in 1951 over their exclusion from citizenship. The petition was denied in 1961. The Indian Claims Commission stated that their claims to tribal citizenship were individual in nature and outside the U.S. government's jurisdiction. The Cherokee Freedmen's Association was faced with two issues regarding their case. On one hand, the Dawes Rolls, a federally mandated tally, was accepted as defining who were legally and politically Cherokee and most of the CFA members were not of Dawes Rolls descent. On the other, the courts saw their claims as a tribal matter and outside of their jurisdiction. Appeals stretched to 1971, but all were denied with only few legal victories to show for their twenty-year effort. On July 7, 1983, the Reverend Roger H. Nero and four other Cherokee Freedmen were turned away from the Cherokee polls as a result of the newly instituted Cherokee voting policy. A Freedman who voted in the 1979 Cherokee election, Nero and colleagues sent a complaint to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, claiming discrimination on the basis of race. On June 18, 1984, Nero and 16 Freedmen descendants filed a class action suit against the Cherokee Nation. Principal Chief Ross Swimmer, tribal officials, the tribal election committee, the United States, the office of the President, the Department of the Interior, the Secretary of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and three Muskogee, Oklahoma, BIA officials were named as defendants. The suit sought nearly $750 million in damages and asked for the 1983 tribal election to be declared null and