Elections officials apologize for voting delays, but will changes be made?
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Honolulu election officials are apologizing for long waits that left many voters standing in rain and darkness for hours on election night.
City Clerk Glen Takahashi said the Elections Division will look into what went wrong, but doubts the rush could not have been predicted.
“Our apologies to those who did wait in our line,” he said.
SPECIAL SECTION: Election 2024
Takahashi says waits of up to six hours or more were unpredictable because of the weather and human factors like traditional voting habits, election suspicions, same-day registration and lack of awareness about early and mail-in voting options.
But others, such as Common Cause Hawaii’s Camron Hurt, say after similar lines four years ago, they should have been more prepared.
“If you look at Oahu, that it’s the most populous island in this state chain, however, there are only two places to vote in person on election day,” Hurt said. “That’s asinine, and anybody saying anything different is lying.”
Learn more: Common Cause Hawaii: Voting by mail cannot replace in-person voting
West Oahu council member Andria Tupola also said the facilities were inadequate for a Presidential election year.
“I want to say that we definitely open up more day of I think the day of strategy has to be much more robust than what we’re doing now,” she said.
But Takahashi said just adding sites might not solve the problem.
“I think we have to be very careful about looking for the silver bullet to try to solve the that last issue, if you will, of getting crunched,” he said. “Because, you know, if we set up more sites, you’re only as good as the site that closes up last, right? And so, no matter what, we could still be faced with the same thing if another site that we opened just couldn’t push through the numbers that we want.”
Watch: Rep. Jill Tokuda on voter wait times: ‘We did not meet the moment’
Takahashi says the Elections Division has enough resources and served 200 voters an hour at Kapolei and 300 per hour at Honolulu Hale. In all, 8,000 in one day and 22,000 over two weeks.
“You really can’t tell what voter excitement is. It’s kind of viral in a certain sense, right?” Takahashi said.
On Hawaii News Now Sunrise, Gov. Josh Green said people should vote by mail, or early, and said he wasn’t concerned about having results delayed past midnight.
“It doesn’t really make any difference,” he said. “We either would have heard it at 7 or 8 p.m. or we heard in the middle of the night. The democracy was intact.”
Takahashi said they will have a post-election review and Council Chair Tommy Waters said the council will look into the election system’s challenges at a briefing in January.
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