Voter ed only receives $25,000
By Lynda Arakawa
Advertiser Capitol Bureau
As Hawai'i nears a major election this year, election officials are faced with providing voter education with a fraction of the money they initially asked for.
The state Office of Elections originally sought $200,000 to teach or remind voters how the election system works and encourage voter registration. Gov. Ben Cayetano's administration cut that request to $100,000, and lawmakers ultimately gave election officials $25,000.
Voter education is critical this year because state and county reapportionment has redrawn district boundaries for virtually all county, state and federal offices. A recent U.S. Census report found Hawai'i's 2000 voter turnout of 44.1 percent was the lowest in the nation and that Hawai'i ranked near the bottom in voter registration.
Some voters have also had problems at the polls. More than 9,300 ballots were declared invalid in the 2000 primary because voters picked candidates from more than one party, which is not allowed in the primary. The voting machines catch the mistakes and voters are allowed to correct them, but 9,300 voters left without doing so.
Larry Meacham, executive director of government watchdog group Common Cause Hawai'i, said $25,000 is not much to reach 400,000 voters.
"I'm sure they'll do their best with the money they got but it won't go very far," he said. "It's too bad because people are still having trouble with the new ballots and also because there are so many candidates. People need to be informed about the (constitutional amendment) questions which are sometimes complex. And they need to be informed on how to vote properly so we don't have problems like there were in Florida."
Lawmakers have said they support voter education but that the budget was extremely tight.
"We just didn't have the money to go around," said Senate Ways and Means Chairman Brian Taniguchi, D-11th (McCully, Mo'ili'ili, Manoa). "There wasn't any real substantive objection to giving them money, we just didn't have as much available."
Officials had wanted the money for voter education efforts such as brochures, media spots, an expanded Web site and demonstrations of voting machines in malls. Office of Elections spokesman Rex Quidilla said officials do not know how far $25,000 will take them.
"The original thought was to scale the goals to what we can afford," he said. "Right now we haven't thought of how you scale it to this level. Overall we're just uncertain, we're going to have to see."
Quidilla said the smaller appropriation would probably mean officials will have to target certain communities rather than take a broadbased approach, but added that other departments face the same fiscal challenges.
"We took cuts like many of the other departments looking for funding this legislative session. It's going to be tough. We face the same things that other departments need to do in doing more with less."
"But on the positive side we do have funding now to do something. We want to get the most bang out of our buck."
Reach Lynda Arakawa at larakawa@honoluluadvertiser.com or at 525-8070.
