Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.

Honolulu Marathon has another successful run

Congratulations to the organizers, volunteers and participants in the Honolulu Marathon.

Our Punahou Key Club worked the water station fronting the Hyatt Regency hotel, together with Key Clubs from Iolani and Farrington High School and numerous adult volunteers.

All of us worked hard to get our water station ready. Our task was made easier by the incredible amount of work put in by the race organizers before we got there.

Although we were from three schools, we had the same task --holding out cups of liquid nourishment.

We heard many thank yous and marveled at the thousands of runners, walkers and wheelchair race participants.

Carol Chun

Presidential protective order deserves support

Forty years ago when I dived the Florida Keys, it had an apparently inexhaustible supply of large reef fish. It was then a remote area, lightly developed, with no apparent need for protection.

Within a few years, however, the new technology of SCUBA and the long reach of power boats and sea planes allowed commercial divers to decimate those fish populations. Efforts to protect those reefs were too little and too late.

The president's executive order gives us a unique opportunity and responsibility to do better in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. This is one of the few places on Earth where a large coral ecosystem is still intact and healthy.

Its value to Hawaii and the world as a natural system is priceless, but could be jeopardized by short-sighted attempts to block or weaken the order.

Dave Raney

Quotables "The cloud of the challenge has been removed by the Supreme Court." Haunani Apoliona TRUSTEE-ELECT FOR THE OFFICE OF HAWAIIAN AFFAIRS Anxious to be sworn in after the Hawaii high court's dismissal of a challenge to the OHA election "None of the fishery resources that we manage are overfished." Kitty Simonds EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE WESTERN PACIFIC FISHERY MANAGEMENT COUNCIL Who doesn't believe that the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosysterm Reserve proposed by President Clinton is necessary, because the waters of the proposed reserve are far from being fished out.

People have right to vote for nobody

As a voter assistance official in my precinct for many years, I have responded to many voter questions, the most frequent being: "Why don't you have a place on the ballot for none of the above?"

To this I replied, "If you don't like anyone, just leave it blank." When asked if, in doing so, it would invalidate the rest of the ballot, I assured them, "No. You don't have to vote for anyone you don't like." The blank on the ballot, in essence, amounts to a vote for none of the above.

On TV the other day, people in Florida were checking out "blank" ballots or actually dimples where the machine rested. One woman even admitted that she was making the decision on whom voters wanted because she surmised that "they voted Democrat on all the rest of the ballot, so they must have wanted to vote for Gore even though they left it blank."

I understood when I took the oath of office for my precinct job that it was a felony to tamper with ballots. Deciding that the voter must have wanted to vote for someone, and thus changing a vote, is against the law.

Betty Jean Corrales
Kailua

Object of any election is to get it right

Statewide elections are massive undertakings involving thousands of people, mostly volunteers. Will there be discrepancies? Of course! That's precisely why laws in every state include recounts as built-in safeguards for close elections.

The Florida Supreme Court ruled that all counties in the state should recount by hand all questionable ballots. Hand recounts are the most accurate method of counting ballots because observers from both political parties are present during the counting and must agree on every ballot.

There are strong feelings and disagreements on both sides, but that's why we have laws and courts. Eventually everything will work its way through to a conclusion. Then the only people crying foul will be those who care more about winning than getting it right.

Jim Loomis
Kailua

Gore is clearly winner of whining contest

Unless you can have a fair and impartial recounting of the ballots throughout the whole country, there will not be a clear winner. However, we do have a clear whiner -- Al Gore.

Ken Kuwahara

Every election has blank ballots

From the Florida courtroom we have heard the phrase "undervote" again and again. What is an undervote, anyway? In plain language it is simply a blank ballot.

In every election, in every state, there are blank ballots. In the recent Hawaii general election, 2,610 people voted for no presidential candidate even though there were a half dozen choices.

That represents 0.7 percent of all ballots cast in Hawaii. This is not significantly different from those undervotes in Florida.

Do we need a recount here? Or are the Gore spinmeisters overdoing the undervote a bit?

James V. Hall

Religion shouldn't determine votes

In his Dec. 2 letter, Melvin Partido says that if every Christian had voted for Bush, we would not be in this post-election chaos.

This is like saying that if every Jewish person had voted for Gore-Lieberman, we wouldn't be in this mess.

None of us would imagine this scenario to be taking in place in our own backyard. There is still time to prevent George Bush from becoming president. Amen.

Jim Rosen

Article was slanted against Bush

I have subscribed to the Star-Bulletin for more than 20 years and have always counted on it displaying at least a modicum of common sense relative to the liberal-conservative situation in this highly liberal state.

However, after reading the Dec. 2 Insight article by Jacob Weisberg of Slate Magazine, I find myself wondering what's going on? This article is about as slanted as anything I've ever seen.

Who is Jacob Weisberg and what are his credentials to comment on the election in this manner? What is Slate Magazine and what possible credential does a magazine that no one has ever heard of provide to a writer?

I object to the typical liberal use of terms such as "Dragon Lady of Tallahassee" and "Bushies." I didn't see similar derogatory terms like "Gories" or reference to any of the Gore hatchet men on radio and TV smearing conservatives who try to present rationality.

I also object to the ignoring of the basic facts of law that the Bush position is based on -- namely, that the votes cast were all legally machine counted; the ballots objected to were approved in advance by Democrats; all precincts had workers available to help with anyone who might be confused; the mandatory recount was carried out as per law; and the cutoff time for recounts was established by Florida law, not Bush. Ignoring such facts is typical of liberals who don't like a given outcome.

R.W. Parkinson

(Editor's note: Slate Magazine is an Internet publication.)

---

Write a
Letter to the Editor

Want to write a letter to the editor?
Let all Star-Bulletin readers know what you think.
Please keep your letter to about 200 words.
You can send it by e-mail to letters@starbulletin.com
or you can fill in the online form for a faster response.
Or print it and mail it to: Letters to the Editor, P.O. Box 3080,
Honolulu, Hawaii 96802. Or fax it to: 523-8509.
Always be sure to include your daytime phone number.