Editorials
Monday, February 15, 1999

Recount of 1998 vote
may change nothing

THE Senate Judiciary Committee has voted to request a full recount or audit of the November general election returns, and it appears that both houses of the Legislature will support the proposal. Mercifully, the committee called for an electronic recount rather than the earlier proposed manual count, which would take longer, be more expensive and be less accurate. Manual counts would be employed in selected precincts, however. Appointment of state Auditor Marion Higa to supervise the recount, as proposed, could give the process more credibility.

Proponents of this action argue that it is necessary to restore public confidence in the electoral system. Public confidence in election results is surely necessary. But we agree with Governor Cayetano that some senators have gone overboard on this issue, giving the public the impression that errors were widespread and a recount could change the results.

The disclosure that a few vote-counting machines malfunctioned during the general election cannot be taken lightly. An investigation is clearly in order. But a more reasonable approach would be spot checks in other precincts to assess the extent of the problem, rather than going immediately to a full recount. Election officials, while welcoming the recount, say they do not expect the numbers to change.

As Richard Borreca noted in a column on this page last Wednesday, in 1960 a recount was made of the Hawaii vote for president and resulted in a reversal of the outcome, with John F. Kennedy defeating Richard Nixon. In that election, the original results showed Nixon winning by just 141 votes. Even with such a narrow margin, the court originally ordered only a partial recount in 36 precincts, expanding the recount gradually to all precincts as more discrepancies appeared. The final results gave Kennedy victory in Hawaii by 256 votes.

As previously noted here, the change to a new vote-counting system was forced on the elections office at virtually the last minute when its staff was sharply reduced, making it unlikely that preparations for the 1998 elections under the old punch-card system could be completed in time. That system was obsolete and overdue for replacement, but the change should have been done in a more orderly fashion, with open bidding. Let's do it right next time.

Needle exchanges

IN 1990 Hawaii became the first state to provide clean needles to drug users in exchange for used needles. The idea is to combat the spread of AIDS through contaminated needles. The program is having some success. An authority on the subject says the syringe-exchange program is keeping rates of HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS, among drug users relatively low.

Dr. Don Des Jarlais, director of the Chemical Dependency Institute of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, said in a report to the state Health Department that 17 percent of AIDS cases in Hawaii are related to drug injections. The national rate is 36 percent. Des Jarlais credited Hawaii's lower rate to efforts to implement needle exchange and other programs for injecting drug users. "Compared to almost any other place in the U.S., you're in great shape," he said.

The exchange program reported 9,491 client visits and 174,509 syringes exchanged during the study period, from October 1997 to September 1998. In 1997, 142,715 syringes were exchanged. As a result, it is estimated that only 1 percent of Hawaii's injection drug users are infected with HIV.

Getting people off drugs is of course preferable to having them inject themselves without getting AIDS. The needle exchange program serves only a limited purpose. But it saves lives. And it costs the state a lot less than caring for AIDS victims.

Scandal over blood

MEANWHILE AIDS figures in a sensational criminal case in France. A former prime minister and two other former cabinet members are on trial on charges of manslaughter and criminal negligence in a scandal involving HIV-tainted blood. The three, including former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, are accused in the cases of seven people who contracted AIDS after receiving transfusions of blood containing HIV from government stocks in the mid-1980s. Five of the seven have died.

About 4,400 people who got transfusions in France in the 1980s, many of them hemophiliacs, were infected with the virus, and experts later termed at least 300 of the cases avoidable. About 40 percent of the infected people have since died.

The former officials are accused among other things of delaying testing of blood for the AIDS virus in order to give a French-designed test a chance to compete commercially with an American-made one that was available months earlier. Other courts have convicted four lower-ranking officials in previous trials. Defenders of Fabius, once considered a leading contender for the French presidency, say that he is being unfairly made a scapegoat for a tragedy.

In Japan, a former health official has been accused in similar cases involving the infection of about 2,000 hemophiliacs with blood-clotting products contaminated with HIV in the 1980s. The former official, Takeshi Abe, had opposed the approval of blood products that were heat-treated to kill the virus. Hemophiliacs charged that Abe opposed the heat treatment in order to give Japanese drug companies time to catch up with foreign competitors that had already implemented the treatment.

It is hard to fathom how officials could be so blinded by nationalism or greed as to endanger the lives of innocent people in this fashion. As in the case of the needle exchanges, the highest priority must go to saving lives.

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Rupert E. Phillips, CEO

John M. Flanagan, Editor & Publisher

David Shapiro, Managing Editor

Diane Yukihiro Chang, Senior Editor & Editorial Page Editor

Frank Bridgewater & Michael Rovner, Assistant Managing Editors

A.A. Smyser, Contributing Editor