Voting meltdown a concern

This is the fifth of an occasional series of stories exploring Hawai'i's poor voter turnout and solutions for change.

By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Staff Writer

With 400 candidates for 127 elected offices and 60,000 of the state's voters having to trek to new polling places, state officials are trying to avoid a meltdown for one of the biggest elections in Hawai'i history.

Among the 127 seats up for grabs are the offices of governor and lieutenant governor, both U.S. House of Representatives seats, every state Senate and House seat, all city and county council seats, as well as a handful of Office of Hawaiian Affairs and Board of Education seats.

"We always have a concern about congestion at the polls," said Rex Quidilla, administrative assistant to state elections chief Dwayne Yoshina.

Redistricting is one reason there are so many offices up at once, and one impact will be that about 60,000 voters will be headed to new polling places. Elections officials hope to minimize voter confusion — sending out voter brochures to voting households statewide in the first week of August, and sending every registered voter a yellow card telling them where they'll be voting. Officials urge those who haven't received the cards to call their county or city clerk's office.

"And that's without reapportionment," he said.

Voters can minimize their own potential problems by thinking ahead.

First, be sure you are registered. If you're not, don't delay. The registration deadline for the Primary Election is August 22. Registration applications are easy to find. There's one in the front pages of most phone books. You can pick one up at many government offices and public libraries. And you can print one out from the state Office of Elections Web site.

Know for certain where your voting place is. In many areas, the longest lines occur first thing in the morning, when people vote before heading to work, and in the afternoon, as people leave work.

Voters can vote before election day in two ways. First is to apply for an absentee ballot, which can be mailed to you and you can return by mail. The second is to vote as a walk-in absentee voter. Call the clerk's office on your island or the state elections office for details about times, dates and locations of walk-in polling places.

With so many candidates running, many voters may have difficulty deciding for whom to vote. While candidates will be trying to get their own messages out, the state Elections Office is helping. For the first time, the office is offering candidates space on its Web site. Candidates are invited to provide a 250-word statement and to provide photographs, and many are on the Web site.

"We're behind because of work associated with the filing deadline, but we're trying to get the rest up," Quidilla said. Follow links from the Web site listed above to the Online Voters Guide, or go directly to the Office of Elections Web site candidates section.

Efforts such as the Web site, statewide mailouts and readily available registration forms are all aimed at countering a disturbing trend in Hawai'i voting — that fewer and fewer people, as a percentage of eligible voters, actually participate in the election process.

It declines from 71 percent in 1960 to 47 percent in 2000. That's a drop of a third of the voters.

In recent years, Hawai'i has had between a third and a half of its eligible voters going to the polls each year. It's higher some years, and lower others. The turnout is clearly not good in a democracy, but is it likely to get any worse?

Evidence on the Mainland is that it can.

Eric Olson, western region director for The Center for Voting and Democracy, said that in some parts of the country, voting has dropped into the single digits.

While Hawai'i in the presidential election of 2000 had the worst turnout in the nation, individual communities in parts of the country had elections in which almost nobody turned out.

In publicity for his book, "Fixing Elections," Olson says the turnouts in some Mainland races — mostly in the East and the South — have been so low as to be stunning.

A recent Dallas mayoral election, 5 percent turnout. A Kentucky statewide primary for governor, 6 percent. A statewide runoff election in North Carolina, 3 percent. A Virginia primary for attorney general, 5 percent. A local election in Rochester, Mass., 7 percent.

"For the first time, we have been seeing an increase in single-digit voter turnout levels all across the nation," he wrote.

There is evidence that techniques like those employed by the Hawai'i state Office of Elections can help build voter turnout, said Ray Wolfinger, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who has conducted research into ways to improve turnout.

Just telling people — by mail or otherwise — where they need to go to cast their votes can increase turnout by half a percent, he said. That's what Hawai'i's yellow cards do.

Wolfinger said some areas have found that they can increase turnout as much as 2 percent by opening the polls earlier, and 1 percent by keeping them open later. Hawai'i's polling places are open on election days from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The research shows that a 1.4 percent increase in turnout can be obtained by mailing all registered voters a sample ballot to study before the election. The Hawai'i Office of Elections has sought money from the Legislature for sending out sample ballots but has never gotten it.

Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808)245-3074.