Posted on: Friday, October 11, 2002

ELECTION 2002
Elections chief says deadline stands

By Johnny Brannon
Advertiser Staff Writer

Hawai'i Chief Elections Officer Dwayne Yoshina said he will definitely not waive a time limit to allow the Democratic Party to replace the late U.S. Rep. Patsy Mink with a substitute candidate on the Nov. 5 general election ballot.

On Wednesday, the Hawai'i Supreme Court denied a request by Gov. Ben Cayetano to order Yoshina to extend the deadline, but did not rule on whether Yoshina could do so on his own.

Yoshina said yesterday he did not believe he had such authority. He also said the law may need to be amended later so it is more clear.

"In the elections marketplace, everybody needs to know what the rules are, and they need to be stable and they need to be consistent," he said.

The decisions by the court and Yoshina mean that Mink's name will stay on the ballot. If she wins, a special election will be held as early as January to replace her.

A special election is already scheduled for Nov. 30 to elect a candidate for the remainder of Mink's current term, which expires Jan. 3.

Yoshina initially estimated the cost of each special election at $2 million, but said yesterday that each would likely cost between $1.3 million and $1.7 million.

Cayetano had argued that Mink's death on Sept. 28, two days after the statutory time limit for the party to name a replacement candidate for the Nov. 5 election, should be viewed as a special circumstance allowing Yoshina to extend the deadline.

The election law states that any part of it may be waived "in special circumstances as provided in the rules adopted by the chief election officer." Cayetano said the problem is that Yoshina and the panel overseeing the chief elections officer never formulated such rules.

"It is really a shame that they did not adopt the rules, and maybe one question to ask them is: Why don't you have rules to cover this type of situation?" the governor said on Wednesday.

Warner "Kimo" Sutton, vice chairman of the Elections Appointment and Review Panel, said the governor and Legislature had never provided the money to go about fine-tuning the rules. The panel had requested $25,000 to pay for notices and a series of public hearings throughout the state, he said.

"The Legislature would not fund us for the past three years, after they mandated that we should make rules," he said. "The governor and lieutenant governor are also responsible, because they could have assisted in having those rules made. To put on a special election for more than $1 million, when we could have had rules for $25,000, is a big difference."

But Yoshina said that the adoption of rules for "special circumstances" would be problematic anyway and that he did not believe passage of the law applied in cases where a candidate died. The intended use of the section was to fill vacancies caused when a public official is recalled by voters or is impeached, he said.

"From my point of view, it shouldn't have been an issue, but it became an issue because that that particular (section) is broadly written," he said. "I guess we have to revisit this, but I just don't have the luxury of time to be more definitive. I have to prepare for the Nov. 5 and Nov. 30 elections."

Twenty-seven people have declared themselves candidates in the Nov. 30 special election so far.

Reach Johnny Brannon at jbrannon@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8070.