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Voter turnout The voter turnout today was extremely light, according to the state elections office.
extremely low
Although mayor expected
few votes in first prinout,
he has big lead
By Jaymes Song
and Gordon Y.K. Pang
Star-BulletinChief elections officer Dwayne Yoshina said: “It’s still pretty low. At 1 o’clock it was around 19 percent to 22 percent. So after that, I don’t think there was a great surge. So we maybe up to 25 to low 30s. I don’t think it picked up.”
Referring to light turnout, Mayor Jeremy Harris said “that’s not good for us.”
He has said a big turnout would favor him and give him a larger margin of victory.
The 6 o’clock printout isn’t going to be good also because HGEA members supporting Hannemann probably voted absentee, Harris said.
But the first printout showed Harris ahead in absentee voting by about 5,100 votes.
“I’m optimistic we’re going to win, but whether we get the 50 percent or not is another story,” Harris said.
Harris pollster Don Clegg also said he had been anxious about the first printout.“This was an area we thought we’d do our worse because of the absentee voting at City Hall,” Clegg said, obviously relieved with the early results.
Clegg said he still expected that by the end of the night, Harris would get between 56 percent to 58 percent. “I’m in line with Chinatown (oddsmakers), or they’re in line with me,” he said.
After making the rounds with the live television crews, Harris got up on stage and urged the crowd of several hundred people to stay put. “I have a feeling we’re going to be up until late tonight.”
Yoshina noted that there were a lot of spoiled ballots. “Most people are looking at that and saying, “how awful,’ but we’re looking at that and saying its a good thing because it shows us the system is working.
“The system allows us to tell voters that they cross-party voted. An indication of the way its working is the number of spoiled ballots we have.“So, that’s something that good for us.”
Under the old punchcard system, “we used to have people drop ballots in and they didn’t know they spoiled them.
“There is some getting used to this. We need to familiarize everybody and with every election we’ll get better at this.”
Commenting about a woman being turned away from a polling place along with others, Yoshina said he didn’t know the specific problem, but noted: “Voters have to take responsibility for their voting. We have these rules that say if you move, change your name, get married -- you have to re-register. And if people do not re-register and expect to go to a polling place and vote -- it’s not gonna happen.”
There were complaints about the secrecy of ballots because election workers took the ballots out of the secrecy sleeve to feed the ballots into the vote-counting machines.
Yoshina said there were plenty of sleeves but not that some people didn’t use them.
He said he thought the whole system has “gone a lot better.”
“We ran 35 machines at our walk-in absentee site statewide for 10 days and we did not have any mechanical failures. And that experience was replicated in the precincts today,” he said.
“I think in Honolulu, we had four machines we had to switch out. And that’s a very, very small number. Big Island had maybe four machines as well. And Maui may have had one. And I don’t know about Kauai.”
