If it were up to the Hawaiʻi Elections Commission, the state would end mail-in voting and hand-count all the ballots.
It's following a national trend of skepticism with the mail-in voting system, largely from the Republican Party after former President Donald Trump initiated false claims of a stolen election in 2020.
The Hawaiʻi Elections Commission is supposed to advise the Elections Office and conduct investigations into the voting process. Its main job is to hire or fire the chief elections officer.
However, commissioners are often talking over one another and can rarely agree on anything — even topics as basic as adjourning meetings.
In nearly every meeting this year, the Republican commissioners have tried to put forth a motion to fire Chief Elections Officer Scott Nago or put him on probation. When voted on, they narrowly failed in a 5-4 vote along party lines, with the exception of Chair Mike Curtis breaking with the conservative pack to vote with the Democrats.
In Hawaiʻi, the chief elections officer certifies elections. If the commission were to fire Nago before he could certify the election, it’s unclear what would happen.
House Speaker Scott Saiki wrote the bill in 2004, changing the Elections Commission laws to what it is today.
“Making this change was to have a commission that would be bipartisan, that would be neutral and objective when it came to overseeing the chief election officer, who administers the elections in our state,” Saiki said.
Leaders of each party in the House and Senate get to appoint four commissioners. The eight commissioners then pick a ninth member to be their chairperson. Before this system was in place, the governor appointed the commissioners.
Since 2020, meetings have become increasingly contentious — with some lasting hours. The focus was once getting more people to vote, while now it's on election security — even though there has never been evidence of widespread voter fraud in Hawaiʻi.
“What you're picking up on is part of the larger election denier movement, the goal of which is really to create doubt in our election system in all sorts of little ways,” said Lizzie Ulmer, senior vice president of strategy and communications at States United Action, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to protecting elections.
“Election denial is really a hometown problem, not just something you hear talked about in the national conversation," she said.
Mixed viewpoints within the commission
States United Action has identified one Elections Commissioner, Kahiolani Papalimu, as an election denier. The group found evidence that Papalimu spread lies about the 2020 election and pressured election officials to refuse certifying the presidential election.
Additionally, other Republican commissioners have led the charge in accusing the Elections Office of mishandling votes.
“It was really important for us to have a really really defined marker for what was going to qualify someone as an election denier,” Ulmer said.
“But we also know that there are going to be people out there — elected official leaders, activists — that are going to fall close to that line. And that's why I think it's all part of a broader movement and not necessarily just only a subset of people that really check that box," she said.
Scotty Anderson, former Republican appointee chair of the Elections Commission, expressed his disappointment in the positions taken by some of the conservative commissioners.
“They have a serious problem now because when I first joined the board, yes we had four Republicans, and yes we had four Democrats, but most of those guys had their head on straight and they listened to the whole thing,” Anderson said.
“They've now got a crew in there that's, and I'm sorry to say it's the Republicans, that just have their heads in a very bad location," he said.
The Hawaiʻi Supreme Court dismissed Commissioner Ralph Cushnie’s complaint of the 2022 election that alleged audits of the electronic voting system used to count mail-in ballots were done improperly. It’s a point of contention that has dominated many election commission hearings.
The election’s office audits 10% of precincts before certifying the election. It's done by using images of the mail-in ballots, but Cushnie wants the physical ballots to be hand-counted. The high court dismissed the complaint.
“The only way to ensure that the vote is correct is to hand-count the paper ballots,” Cushnie said. “If ballot images can be manipulated, we shouldn't be using them for audits. We need to use the voter-verifiable paper audit trail.”
Chief Elections Officer Scott Nago explained that although there has never been any proof of compromised ballot images in Hawaiʻi, physical ballots are kept and can be checked if requested. At the commission’s request, the Office of Elections will be doing a manual audit next year on the 2022 House District 37 race between Jamie Detweiler and Rep. Ryan Yamane. Yamane won by about 3,500 votes.
Nago explained that if they did the audit for the entire election using paper ballots, it would take weeks.
“When we were under the polling place model, all the ballots came back segregated by polling place. In a vote-by-mail model, all ballots come back at various times, so they're not necessarily segregated by their precinct. It’s all mixed up,” he said.
“If we're looking for the ballots in the hundreds of thousands of ballots that we received, it would take us more time to do. ... We want finality with the election, so we use the images so that we can do the audit and get it done faster and confirm the election.”
Nago added that the computers being used are not connected to the internet and ballot images are locked once scanned into the system.
However, Cushnie's court complaint has been used by some Republican-appointed commissioners and the Hawaiʻi Republican Party to cast doubt on the 2022 state election of Gov. Josh Green and Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke.
Republicans say because Cushnie’s case was pending at the Supreme Court, Nago should not have certified the election until after the court’s decision was released on Dec. 15.
However, the law says that the certificates can be "delivered," only after a final determination has been made — and not that they can’t be certified.
Nago explained that although he certified the election as the complaint was awaiting a decision, he did not deliver the certificate until after, although Green and Luke were inaugurated on Dec. 5 and the court did not deny Cushnie’s appeal until Dec. 27.
There are other issues Cushnie has brought up as well, including one which conflates an unofficial manual count of daily dropbox pickups of mail-in ballots Kauaʻi County did in the 2022 election to determine staffing and resource allocation with an official count.
Cushnie points to that unofficial manual count being different from the official ones that were released after election night as proof that ballots are not being tallied up correctly.
However, Kauaʻi County explained that those manual counts were not official and were just meant to help them estimate staffing needs and how many ballots they were still waiting for in each area as election day approached.
Seeking transparency
These days, nearly all the testifiers at commission hearings share similar views and repeat the same issues.
Hawaiʻi Republican Party Chair Tamara McKay sends out newsletters to party members, encouraging them to testify at the Elections Commission meetings.
She recently sent an email out about the 2022 certification but did not include the Election Office’s response.
“If they're so worried about misinformation or causing chaos, then why aren't they being fully transparent themselves and argumentative instead of accommodating what the citizens of the state of Hawaiʻi are requesting within the boundaries of the laws that are written,” McKay said.
“It seems like they continue to manipulate the interpretation of the laws in order to avoid what the majority of people want, which is transparency in a free and fair election.”
The Republican Party of Hawaiʻi gives recommendations to the minority leader of who they think should be on the commission. After the 2020 election, the party issued false allegations about the election of President Joe Biden and told members to push officials to not certify the election.
McKay was not the party chair at the time, but when asked if she thought Trump won the 2020 election, she was unsure.
“I do feel that there's enough evidence that would warrant the possibility that he did win the election. And I don't understand why everybody is fighting so hard,” she said.
“What's the big deal? If he won, he won. If he didn't, he didn't. Either way, taking those ballots and recounting it in a transparent way would either support the claim that he won or it would totally eliminate the suspicion.”
There has been no evidence of widespread voting irregularities and lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election have failed.
Public criticism
Currently, nearly all the testifiers at commission hearings share similar views and repeat the same issues. At the October commission meeting, some went so far as to make veiled threats to commissioners.
“If I were you, I would resign today. I would gather up all my family, all my money that, of course, you've already made, and I would disappear, maybe even into a foreign country, and get the heck out of the way because God is going to come for you,” said one testifier about an hour and half into the meeting.
“It doesn't take me to come for you. It doesn't take other people in this thing coming from you, but you are going to be hunted down by white hats," they continued.
Political analyst Colin Moore added that the idea that elections are not secure is not a popular one, but it does bring out a very vocal minority.
“They're going to hear mainly from critics, not from people who basically think the Election Office is doing a reasonably good job,” he said.
“This is one of the key issues that's motivated a lot of conservative Republicans — this intense concern about the security of elections — and because it's been spread so widely through social media because it's a key issue and its importance has been amplified by former President Trump.”
Elections Commissioner Jeffrey Osterkamp, who was recently appointed by Saiki, said there’s a difference between fixing small mistakes in the Office of Elections and completely discrediting the entire system.
“If something needs improvement, I think we all agree that we want to do the best we can to correct the issue, but that in itself does not mean that our elections are invalid or problematic on a large scale,” Osterkamp said.
“So we don't want to give people the idea that there are small issues that would cast doubt on the entire election process.”
Nago still wants the job
The Elections Office has been criticized in the past for mistakes — particularly at the start of Nago's leadership, which began in 2010.
For example, some Oʻahu polling places in 2012 ran out of ballots on the day of the election. In 2014, 800 Maui ballots were found during a routine audit a few days after the primary election and had to be added to the final results, although it did not alter any of the races.
Since then, there hasn't been much controversy with Nago and the Elections Office — until now.
Despite all of the recent criticism Nago still wants the job.
"When we're actually running on election day, you can see the sense of community. You can see all the volunteers coming together. It's really a group effort, a community effort. Those are the things that outweigh the contentious part and that's why I continue to stay on the job," Nago said.
"It's really disheartening to see [the commission] criticizing me, and they're not just criticizing me they're criticizing all the volunteers that come together as a community statewide to do public service and it's just disheartening when they do that kind of stuff."
In a 5-3 vote in August, the Hawaiʻi Elections Commission decided to advise the chief election officer to tell the state Legislature to have one-day, in-person elections in the precincts by hand-counting paper ballots. Those voting "yes" were the Republican appointees: Chair Curtis and Commissioner Peter Young, who is the recent Democrat appointee by Senate President Ron Kouchi.
Denialism being 'alive and well in Hawaiʻi'
The vote is largely symbolic, as it’s the Legislature that has the power to implement the voting system. In 2019, the Legislature voted to implement all-mail voting after finding that about half of Hawaiʻi residents were already voting absentee in previous elections. Only former Rep. Val Okimoto and now minority leader Rep. Lauren Matsumoto voted against the measure.
The 2020 general election had the highest voter turnout since 1996.
Saiki, who also introduced the 2019 vote-by-mail legislation, was disappointed in what the Elections Commission has become.
“What we're seeing today is that, and people in Hawaiʻi should be aware of it, is that the election denier and MAGA efforts that we see across the United States is alive and well in Hawaiʻi and it's also seeped into the Elections Commission,” he said.
“It's unfortunate that the Republican Party has appointed one or two members to the commission who are really really determined to carry out what the election deniers are doing on the mainland."
Saiki said, in his opinion, Hawaiʻi has one of the, "best voting systems in the United States. ... We have made the elections process in Hawaiʻi very very accessible to people who want to vote and the Elections Commission should not disrupt that system.”
Saiki recently lost his seat after over 25 years in the Legislature in the 2024 primary election to Kim Coco Iwamoto.
Meanwhile, the state Election Office is working on administering the Nov. 5 general election. Nago acknowledged the strain on staff from the levels of complaints and requests put on his office from the commission.
“It does take away focus from our focus on administering the elections. It's kind of like a geography teacher instead of focusing on plate tectonics, having to reinforce that the Earth is round and not flat,” he said.
“It does take away from what we have to do, but it's something we have to do.”
The Elections Office has a page on its website debunking misinformation that voters can look to for answers.
Mail-in ballots for the upcoming election are expected to be sent out this week.
