County turnout tops 66 percent

Long lines stalled results, but officials pleased with turnout

While long lines delayed the closing of the polls on election night in Hawaii, candidates and election officials praised the high voter turnout that saw every county surpass 60 percent, including 66.4 percent in Maui County.

It was Maui County's best general election turnout in decades, besting every presidential election in the past 20 years and the 63.4 percent the county posted in 1996, the earliest year that the state Office of Elections offers county-specific turnout data on its website.

"I was hoping for 60,000 ballots to be returned, and the voters excelled and ended up carrying us through to over 70,000 between electronic and paper ballots," Maui County Clerk Kathy Kaohu said Wednesday following a sleepless night of vote counting.

Of the 107,930 registered voters in Maui County, 71,634 cast their ballots. Of the total turnout, 67,077, or 62.1 percent, voted by mail, while 4,557, or 4.2 percent, voted in person.

Among the 832,466 registered voters statewide, 579,165, or 69.6 percent, cast ballots. Kauai County logged the best turnout with 72.1 percent, followed by the City and County of Honolulu at 70 percent and Hawaii County at 69.5 percent.

Polls were set to close at 7 p.m., with results expected shortly after, but long lines for in-person voting and registration held up the release of the numbers. On Oahu, hundreds were still in line at Kapolei Hale at about 9 p.m., and at Honolulu Hale, the last person walked in to cast a ballot at 9:21 p.m., Hawaii News Now reported. At Maui's Velma McWayne Santos Community Center in Wailuku, a Maui News photographer observed the last voter go in at around 7:35 p.m., with the final voter leaving shortly after 8 p.m.

"They don't release first results until all the voter service centers were closed," Kaohu said. "From Maui and what I saw on the news for Oahu, they still had voters. . . . That's why there was a little delay in the releasing. They're not going to release any type of results while voters are voting."

However, Kaohu said that the delays and long lines "didn't really have a bearing on our operation." She said that the County Clerk's Office was still processing ballots as it waited for lines to go down on Oahu. The two charters that flew in ballots from Molokai and Lanai came in at about 8:30 p.m., while the ballots from Hana made it into town at about 9 p.m.

At Maui County's three voter service centers, the number of votes cast and same-day voter registrations shot up on Election Day. The center in Wailuku, which opened on Oct. 20, didn't see too many registrations leading up to the election -- 13 on the slowest day and 35 on the busiest -- but on Monday they spiked to 95 and on Tuesday they hit 256. In total there were 604 new voter registrations at the service center in Wailuku, 21 on Molokai and 12 on Lanai from Oct. 20 to Tuesday.

Many of the 4,557 votes cast at Maui County's voter service centers were turned in on Election Day; 1,212 of the 4,216 votes in Wailuku, 111 of the 270 votes in Kaunakakai and 23 of the 71 votes in Lanai City took place on Tuesday.

"From morning until closing it was a constant stream of individudals wanting to register to vote and vote the same day," Kaohu said of the Maui location.

She said in the future, adding more voter service centers "would be a good idea," a concern voiced by some candidates and civic rights groups leading up to the election.

"That will definitely be one of the things we look at in the upcoming year at the state Legislature to allow us a little flexibility to create our own hours and our days of operation for voter service centers," she said. "Even if it's like for a week prior we have one in Hana, we have one in West Maui, South Maui, I think it would be very beneficial."

She said that she believed voting by mail helped improve turnout and was also a welcome solution in the COVID era of social distancing. While some voters who showed up in person expressed worry over casting their ballots through the U.S. Postal Service, Kaohu pointed out that people still had the option to hand them in directly to a voter service center, a secure dropbox or to the County Clerk's Office. She said that in the future, one possible change that a volunteer proposed could be an envelope with a perforated tear-away that election officials could remove to see the voter's signature and the bar code ID.

Kaohu explained that the 107,930 registered voters in Maui County reported by the state include some nonactive voters and questionable addresses; cleaning out those addresses could mean better turnout. As of Saturday, she said there were 97,517 active voters in Maui County. The Clerk's Office sent out 92,711 ballot envelope packets in early October.

Kaohu added that she just wanted "to mahalo the voters for stepping up and meeting us in the middle and knowing what their roles were, and just all the organizations that helped to provide outreach and education for this new vote-by-mail process."

* Colleen Uechi can be reached at cuechi@mauinews.com.