Voting mess-up shelves voting bill

We all see the irony in this, right?

Lawmakers made a huge production out of legislation conceived as a response to the way the last round of elections were mismanaged.

Perhaps folks have forgotten what happened. Polling places ran out of paper ballots, and were under-equipped with the electronic voting machines, which all added up to extremely long lines and late voting returns. Oh, right.

Senate Bill 853 — requiring the elections commission to conduct a performance evaluation of the chief election officer after each election — went through two sets of hearings. Not everyone thought the evaluations would do much good.

After all that, failure to get quorum just before a deadline last Friday meant that the bill is not going to advance out of conference committee this session.

Screw-ups beget more screw-ups, it seems.

A ‘safe haven’ for unwanted newborns

Hawaii was among the last states to allow parents to legally abandon an "unwanted" baby less than 72 hours old at a hospital or other designated site — under the so-called "safe haven" or "Baby Moses" laws.

That law came to mind this week when a woman claimed to have found an abandoned newborn girl at Sandy Beach Sunday night and took her to a hospital. Police now say the 21-year-old is the baby’s mother and has been arrested for filing a false police report.

A decade ago, Gov. Linda Lingle vetoed a previous attempt at a "safe haven" measure, concerned "that any good that might be accomplished by this bill is likely to be outweighed by the harm that it would cause."

Nevertheless, Hawaii’s law allowing a baby to be abandoned at a hospital was enacted in 2007, and all states now have such statutes. Parents should be aware during such dire times.