Hawaii’s big “D,” the Democratic Party, and little “d,” democracy, are still not on the same page.
Two years ago, it was freedom-of-speech issues. This year, it was freedom to vote.
Remember when David Ige was the outspent, little-heard-from state senator challenging Gov. Neil Abercrombie for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination?
Abercrombie was scheduled, along with other party leaders, to speak at the Hawaii Democrats’ 2014 May state convention convention in Waikiki.
Ige was, at first, denied a chance to address the delegates, and the usually mild-mannered candidate was furious.
“Our campaign is getting stronger every single day,” Ige told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “I can see why the governor is afraid to have me address the convention. So I’m disappointed.”
Party leaders, many of them Abercrombie supporters, said there just wasn’t time to listen to so many speeches. Then Abercrombie wisely intervened and offered Ige some of his speaking time.
In a letter to Dante Carpenter, the party’s chairman, the governor said it was “in the finest traditions of our party” to allow equal opportunity for others to speak.
Now when it comes to holding a party election, Hawaii’s majority party might want to get former President Jimmy Carter or the Carter Center, which has supervised elections from Bolivia to Mozambique.
Back in 2008. the Hawaii Democratic preference poll was a study in chaos and confusion. The party failed to print enough ballots and was swamped with more than 37,000 voters. The late Sen. Daniel K. Inouye stood in line for more than a hour waiting to vote.
Abercrombie, then a congressman, stood on a tabletop in Manoa urging people to just take a sheet of paper and write their own ballot.
The 2016 Democratic presidential poll pulled in almost 34,000 votes and was a whopping victory for Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, winning with 70 percent of the vote. The party was lucky it was such a blow-out, because if it had been close, both sides would be screaming about how the election was conducted.
The Democrats came up with the bizarre plan that the polling would start at 1 p.m. and then go until there didn’t appear to be any more people. There was no accounting for people coming in late or people planning on voting later.
Some party officials, showing more arrogance than savvy, were saying, “We told everyone to come early.”
Yes, if you have nothing else to do on a Saturday, you can stand in line for three hours before getting a chance to vote. But if you are an older voter, or a voter handling two young children, or a voter with a life about more than Democratic preference polls, you were effectively disenfranchised by the arbitrary closing time.
Online comments and even the Democratic Party’s own Facebook pages were filled with complaints from disgruntled Democrats who wanted to vote but were denied because party officials in each precinct randomly decided when to stop the voting.
After the vote, there was no official mention from the party about the problems or even a pledge to do better.
Hawaii’s Democratic Party may have gained 7,000 new members this year, but it has yet to learn how to hold an election.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.
