At least two times every two years, the same antediluvian ceremony repeats at the state Capitol.
First, the finely crafted koa desks and podiums are covered in protective cardboard. Plywood covers the floor, sheets of plastic lay over the wool carpets, dozens of prehistoric computers, many with an operating system from before Windows, grind into life. Telephones with cords are brought in and linked to precincts across the state.
Outside, more than a hundred tables clog the Capitol’s four basement hallways, folding chairs are set up, extension cords are unrolled, three calculators with AC backup are placed on every table. The entire Capitol parking garage is converted into a holding area with more tables and coolers for drinks. Mountains of boxes holding bentos are stacked and huge fans whir to vent the exhaust.
In the evening, dozens of taxi cabs dart through the garage tunnels delivering the voting machines from the precincts.
It is a building under siege. The battle is counting Hawaii’s election ballots for the primary and general elections held every two years.
The Office of Elections’ small staff swells by hundreds on the election days. Citizen volunteers are paid a stipend to show up both in the Capitol counting center and in the hundreds of precinct places throughout the state. There are audit teams to check the polling books, to make sure the count of voters in a precinct match the number of votes in the precinct.
In the middle of this archaic flood of rote and arithmetic are four new counting machines. Ballots go in, are scanned and counted.
Next to them is a bank of card readers that take the smart cards from the voting machines.
Those two devices hold the key to putting Hawaii’s elections in the 21st century, because with them, the state could turn to vote-by-mail.
The polling places would be gone, the volunteers would not be needed, and the biennial festival of the antiquated would disappear as Hawaii voters take their ballot from their mailbox, mark it and mail it back.
On election day, the ballots would go through the big counting machine and the results announced, bentos and hand calculators not needed.
After years of holding elections that under the most charitable assessment did not inspire confidence, the state has found a good team.
In 1998, the old team was so disparaged and so doubted, there was a statewide recount, the first since statehood. Since then, the Office of Elections has been created and a low-key professional staff has been assembled.
Their good work was marred this year by whatever it was that happened on Hawaii island that caused the new county clerk, Jamae Kawauchi, to fumble opening the precincts on time. It was so bad that Gov. Neil Abercrombie rightly had to step in and order that Hawaii island’s polling stations remain open for an extra 90 minutes.
That caused Abercrombie to call for Hawaii to go to a total vote-by-mail system, saying it would be more convenient. Hawaii is one of 28 states that already allow permanent absentee voting with voters mailed a ballot. The key is not in how many Hawaii voters use it (more than 40 percent) but in Hawaii’s response rate.
The Honolulu clerk’s office mailed out 102,350 absentee ballots. A total of 97,056 ballots were returned, meaning almost 95 percent of those who were mailed a ballot mailed it back.
Of course that doesn’t mean vote-by-mail would automatically make our voter turnout 95 percent, but there is nothing wrong with shedding our gothic past and crashing through to the 21st century.
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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at <@Tagline -- email1>rborreca@staradvertiser. com<@$p>.
