A record-high turnout for the August primary election — Hawaii’s first full-scale vote-by-mail balloting — fueled optimism that we’ve readily managed the switch away from old-school polling places. Slightly more than half of all eligible voters cast ballots, with fewer than 1% completed in person. Now is no time to get complacent, since there clearly is much room for improvement on turnout.
A more rigorous test of Act 136 (2019) is now underway as a general election, especially one with a presidential race, draws more voters. Given that democracy works better when more people participate, it’s encouraging that the fledgling law is continuing to deliver stepped-up accessibility and convenience for voters.
During a recent Honolulu Star-Advertiser “Spotlight Hawaii” interview, Scott Nago, the state’s chief elections officer, said that at 10 days ahead of Election Day, 344,000 people, slightly more than 40% of the statewide electorate, had already cast mail-in ballots.
Hawaii law allows for processing — opening envelopes and running ballots through a scanner — to start at the 10-day mark, and that’s a good thing, to allow for timely results in highly consequential local races, such as for Honolulu mayor, city prosecutor and Hawaii island mayor. The first-printout results will be made public shortly after voting wraps up at 7 p.m. Nov. 3.
In the Aug. 8 primary, thanks to vote-by-mail, that first release of results included 90% of the vote — a rapid pace compared with previous elections in which the initial rounds routinely included less than 10%, with updates continuing for hours.
With Election Day now one week away, Nago recommends today as the last day for mailing in your ballot, to ensure U.S. Postal Service delivery. Starting Wednesday, options to make sure a ballot gets counted will be via yellow drop-boxes around town and booth-voting at voter service centers.
Through vote-by-mail, Hawaii appears to be making strides toward shedding its ranking among states with the worst voter turnout. Also contributing to more robust participation is a state law, which took effect two years ago, allowing eligible would-be voters to register and cast ballots on Election Day.
At the local level, where at least a few recent races have been decided with two-digit leads, every vote counts as we choose leaders to determine how taxpayer money is used, which laws should be passed and to represent the voice of constituents. In the 2018 general election, City Council District 4 (Hawaii Kai to Ala Moana) incumbent Trevor Ozawa edged out opponent Tommy Waters by 22 votes.
Waters and a group of East Honolulu voters then filed separate challenges and the Hawaii Supreme Court invalidated the results after determining that elections officials violated state rules by collecting mail-in ballot envelopes after a set deadline. A runoff election was held after officials explained they could not separate out the votes collected after the deadline — and Waters won.
Since then, the state has enacted a law requiring mandatory recount in races and ballot measures in which the margin of victory is 100 or fewer votes, or less than one-quarter of 1% of votes cast. The law rightly aims to bolster confidence in electoral system fairness, and lifts the burden of having to file suit for recount in close elections.
At the national level, President Donald Trump has stirred voter anxiety with frequent complaints about potential for widespread fraud — despite solid evidence that fraud is quite rare, even in states that have sent ballots through the postal system for years.
In Hawaii’s case, the all-mail process, complete with vigorous security protections, was in place well before the COVID-19 pandemic struck — a fortunate happenstance. Further, since 2014, more people in the islands have chosen to cast ballots before rather than on Election Day.
Despite Hawaii’s easy-to-navigate process, about 1,000 last-minute voters missed the primary election deadline, and their ballots were not counted. Nago’s sound advice in this final push to Election Day: “Don’t delay, vote today.”
