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2024 Hawaii & National Election Coverage

State Rep. Elijah Pierick eked out a 20-vote reelection victory today over Democratic high school teacher Corey Rosenlee to represent a region of West Oahu that continues to elect Republicans in an otherwise deep blue state dominated by Democrats.

This year, the Republican Party added three new House members and one more to the Senate.

With Pierick, they now account for nine Republicans in the 51-member House and three in the 25-member Senate.

Rosenlee, the former head of the powerful Hawaii State Teachers Association, initially was ahead with 76 votes when the first election returns finally came out well past midnight Wednesday morning.

But the final count of the remaining 18,000 votes Wednesday night showed Pierick winning with just 20 votes, triggering the only automatic recount of any Hawaii race this year.

It took parts of two days for already exhausted state elections workers — monitored by volunteer “official observers” from both the Democratic and Republican parties — to conduct the tedious work of sorting through every 481,876 votes cast across the state by mail to determine which ones came from only House District 39, Royal Kunia-Waipahu­-Honouliuli, in order to audit Wednesday night’s results.

Hawaii voters overwhelmingly prefer voting by mail and Rosenlee took 52%, or 4,478, of the mail-in ballots compared with 4,147 mail-in votes for Pierick.

But thousands of voters — most of them Republicans — exercised their right to vote in person on Election Day and flooded voter service centers in all island counties by standing in the rain for hours until well past midnight Wednesday morning.

Pierick’s win came after he received 73% of the in-person votes cast before or on Election Day. He received 559 of the in-person votes compared with only 208 for Rosenlee.

In the end — after all the all mail-in and in-person votes were counted and then recounted — Pierick received 4,706 votes compared with 4,686 for Rosenlee, identical to Wednesday night’s final outcome.

The crew of 13 already exhausted workers from the state Office of Elections — monitored by 20 observers — resumed the recount today that confirmed Pierick’s victory.

The team spent 12 hours Thursday — from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. — and returned to the Capitol this morning to finish the recount after some of them already had been up for 36 hours straight, Hawaii Elections Chief Scott Nago told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

The election to represent House District 39 was the second consecutive race in two years between Pierick and Rosenlee after Pierick won the first time in 2022 by 704 votes.

By state law, recounts are automatically triggered when the outcome of a race comes down to fewer than 100 votes or one-fourth of 1%, whichever is less.