Let us celebrate May by worrying about the calendar.
In many ways this election year will be a peculiar one, because it will be driven by a new calendar.
Federal election law forced the state to back up the date for the primary election, so that overseas voters would be guaranteed enough time to get their ballots.
So the primary election that was held in September is now set for Aug. 11. That’s one week after the official start of the public school year, but it is still in the middle of the summer. This is closer to the baseball all-star game than the start of major league playoff games.
The question is who will show up to vote.
This is a presidential election year, which historically bucks up Hawaii’s lousy voter turnout numbers. But the primary election is not a major event.
In the 2008 primary, the last presidential election year, the statewide voter turnout was 36.9 percent. The numbers give a hint of what to expect this year.
There were 151,000 voters who went to the polls and 95,000 who voted early with an absentee ballot.
In total, almost 119,000 took a Democratic ballot on Election Day and another absentee 75,700 voters went Democrat.
So during the last presidential primary election year, the Democrats had almost 195,000 voters. That is a fairly small universe of voters.
"This year we just don’t know who is going to vote, and who knows how many people will vote absentee," said one Democratic political consultant, who asked not to be identified.
Two years ago the primary voter turnout jumped a tad, up to almost 43 percent. And the absentee or mail-in total was 19 percent, an increase over 2008’s 14 percent absentee turnout.
The fear today is that the early primary election date along with a general lack of interest in races that don’t include the presidential candidates means a low turnout.
Absentee balloting starts July 30, but it is likely that mailed-out absentee ballots will be arriving even earlier than that. The job for candidates is figuring out who is likely to get an absentee ballot and will return it during a mid-summer primary.
That, however, is not the end of the calendar-based election year worries.
Reapportionment is still with us.
On May 18, the federal court is scheduled to review the latest state reapportionment effort. There is little consensus on how that will turn out, but it will add a new series of questions if the existing reapportionment plans is rejected.
The opposition to the plan is that it does not closely follow the principle of one person, one vote.
If the new plan is tossed, there is a legitimate question of whether the reapportionment commission has enough time to prepare a new set of election boundaries that the elections office can use to print new ballots.
Politicians know when voters will go to the polls, but they will not know which specific House or Senate district boundary is where until sometime after May 18.
In total, that is a lot of unknowns.
Politics may be art, not science — but this year, one could consider it to be operating under the chaos theory.
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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.
