"It was pretty screwed up," said Jo Jordan, who was re-elected to the board and attended yesterday's installation of 2005-07 members of the city's neighborhood boards. "I know people who were really upset with the way the Neighborhood Commission handled the errors."

According to Jordan, the Wai'anae Coast Neighborhood Board is broken into Subdistricts 1, 2, 3 and 4. The ballots mailed to 10,700 voters in the area were intended to contain corresponding candidate profiles.

But, said Jordan, "What happened is the profiles for Subdistricts 1 and 2 were sent out to 3 and 4, and vice versa. And then, when they tried to correct it, they did it again."

Finally, she said, the commission sent a third mailing that contained the profiles of candidates from all the subdistricts. But the mailers contained no explanation why the profiles were being sent, causing even more confusion. And by then, she said, many voters had marked and mailed in their ballots.

Jordan thinks the commission should have nullified the first ballots and made certain that a second set would be accompanied by correct profiles and a detailed letter explaining the mix-up.

She said she first realized that errors had been made when people who weren't in her subdistrict told her they intended to vote for her.

Jordan said that unlike some of the area's candidates, she didn't scream about the foul-ups. She said she'd become disenchanted because she felt that board members had begun voting in blocs instead of by their consciences and "I didn't care if I got re-elected."

Once the results came in and some of the most vocal candidates were elected, the shouting about the errors died down, she said.

One board member who wasn't re-elected and didn't calm down was Marilyn Kurshals. She gathered signatures on a petition that challenged the election and called for it to be held again.

Kurshals says she's not spewing grapes. She insists that the integrity of neighborhood board voting process is at stake.

"This isn't about me personally," she said. "It's 'we the people.' The system is seriously flawed."

But Neighborhood Commission secretary Baybee Hufana-Ablan, who served as the announcer at yesterday's installation, said the Wai'anae Coast ballot vote was not as messed up as it seems.

Hufana-Ablan said the problem occurred because someone on her staff did not do a full supervision of the Wai'anae Coast balloting process.

But she said the commission's charter only calls for ballots to be sent to voters. The profiles had been added merely as a courtesy to assist voters in making their choices.

"The ballots were correct," she said. "Only the candidate profiles were mixed up."

Hufana-Ablan said a press release was issued after the incorrect profiles were sent, all the subdistrict candidate profiles were placed on the commission's Web site, and she personally apologized to the community last month at a Wai'anae Coast Neighborhood Board meeting.

"I spelled it out to them that I am new to public service ... and this was my first election," she said.

She said the chief monitoring officer for the election conducted a recount of Kurshals' subdistrict and found that the results had not changed. The officer also determined that the commission's errors did not warrant a re-election.

As for the cost to taxpayers of mailing an extra 21,000 profiles, Elwin Spray, the commission's public relations assistant for elections, said: "Normally we're mailing our stuff by carrier route presorts, which is the cheapest way you can get it out."

However, Kurshals said only the second batch of profiles arrived at her door by presort mail. Her official ballot and the third set of profiles came first-class.

Undaunted by her setbacks, Kurshals maintains that the Wai'anae Coast election errors were only a symptom of a more serious overall problem. So now she's pushing a resolution introduced this year by Honolulu City Council chairman Donovan Dela Cruz.