|
Snafus invalidate
9,559 ballots
Election officials will reassess
printed instructions to reduce
cross-party voting
Carlisle indicates third term will be his last
Apo wins City Council seat outright
Parties hold post-election rallies
State elections officials say they are re-examining voter instructions and procedures after about one of every 26 ballots cast for Saturday's primary election did not get counted because of cross-party voting.
A total of 9,559 ballots, or about 3.8 percent of the total primary election turnout of 248,683 ballots, were invalidated because voters voted for candidates in more than one party.
The number of votes that did not count is about 170 percent higher than the 3,517 ballots invalidated in 2002 because of cross-party voting.
It is also greater than the number of invalidated votes in the 1998 primary, when the state switched from punch-card ballots to the present optical scanning counting system, prompting court challenges to the election results.
Only a few races appeared close enough to be possibly affected by the invalidated votes.
The narrowest margin of victory appeared to be in the Republican state Senate primary for the Lanai-Molokai-Upcountry Maui seat between Robb Finberg and Elaine Slavinsky, which was decided by 29 votes.
Slavinsky said last night that she would look into filing a petition with the state Supreme Court over the election, but "that's all I would do at this point."
A Democratic House primary in Waikiki between Rex Saunders and Dick Ornellas came down to 36 votes.
Ornellas, who lost the election, could not be reached for comment last night.
Chief Election Officer Dwayne Yoshina said he doubts that a challenge to the primary would be successful.
Mail-in absentee voters "have a higher level of responsibility" to fill out their ballots correctly Yoshina said. "There's no way to get out of that."
Most of the 5,559 invalidated absentee ballots are believed to be mail-in ballots because the optical scan counters used in precincts and by absentee walk-in voters will reject cross-party ballots and give people another chance to vote.
Another 4,000 voters neglected or refused to resubmit ballots even though their ballots had been rejected by the polling station counters.
Alex Sonson, who lost a Democratic primary in 1998 by eight votes, said yesterday that it is almost impossible to overturn a primary election result.
State law does not allow for a recount or to revote an election. Sonson said a candidate has only a week to collect enough evidence that an election result was wrong and prove it to the state Supreme Court.
The deadline to file a complaint for the primary election is Friday.
Sonson was one of four people who unsuccessfully petitioned the Supreme Court to review the results of the 1998 primary because of alleged mechanical and human errors with the then-new optical scanning ballot counting system.
"Nobody has ever overturned an election result," Sonson said.
Yoshina said officials will be reviewing what went wrong this year to try and improve voter education and instructions for the 2006 primary.
Cross-party voting will not be a factor in the upcoming general election because the ballot will not be separated by political party as in the primary.
"I always want people's vote to count," Gov. Linda Lingle said yesterday. But answering questions after yesterday's GOP unity brunch, she noted that one reason for the high number of disqualified ballots is that people voting in Democratic races also saw Republican candidates that they wanted to support.
The governor said it is always a good idea to review elections to see if they can be improved the next time around.
Election observers say it is obvious the voting instructions are not clear enough and need to be changed.
The instructions tell voters to "vote within one ballot only" but do not specifically tell voters to vote for only one party.
But elections officials said the instructions have not changed in the last six years, so that cannot be the only explanation for the large spike in invalidated ballots.
Office of Elections spokesman Rex Quidilla said the ballots disqualified on primary election day might be due in part to a large number of new poll volunteers and turnover in precinct chairmanships.
This is the first election that Republican poll volunteers were in charge of precincts. State law requires that the leadership of the precincts goes to the party of the governor.
A number of polling places on Oahu reported more difficulty than usual with "spoiled" ballots that had to be revoted because of cross-party voting.
Quidilla also said a record number of mail-in absentee ballots might have also contributed to the large number of invalidated absentee ballots.
Yoshina noted that the interpretation of the 1978 state Constitutional Convention requires that a voter's party choice be secret. That is why voters take the ballots of all five qualified political parties into the voting booth.
The election ballot has each party's candidates on one side of the ballot, and nonpartisan races in which everyone can vote on the other side.
The political parties are separated by color-coded headings, and voters are supposed to vote for only one party's candidates.
Saturday's election was also the first time the state used a new electronic voting system, which apparently delayed the final election results until yesterday afternoon.
Poll workers apparently forgot to collect the machines from five precincts Saturday, Quidilla said. Election officials were not able to reach anyone to unlock the precincts until yesterday morning, so final results were not printed until about 1 p.m.
The final results included 6,432 additional votes, including from a precinct in Kalaupapa, Molokai, that apparently came in late.
Wasted trips to the polls
This is a list of the invalidated ballots in primary elections dating to 1992.
Election | Invalidated Ballots | % of Vote 2004 9,559 3.8% 2002 3,517 1.3% 2000 9,342 3.7% 1998* 8,017 2.7% 1996 1,676 0.6% 1994 1,714 0.5% 1992 1,147 0.4% *1998 is when the state switched from punch-card ballots to the optical scanning counting system.
SOURCE: STATE OFFICE OF ELECTIONS
BACK TO TOP |
Voter turnout hits new low
Voter turnout for Saturday's primary hit an all-time low, despite a record absentee vote.
The final uncertified results from the primary show 248,683 people statewide cast ballots out of 626,120 registered voters, for a 39.7 percent turnout. About 17 percent voted Republican, and the large portion -- 48.5 percent -- voted in the Democratic primary.
A record 79,276 people voted absentee, about 32 percent of the total votes cast.
In the 2002 primary, 274,517 people, or about 41.1 percent of the 667,679 registered voters, actually voted. And in 2000, the last time Honolulu had a mayor's race, 250,848 out of 629,162 registered voters cast ballots, for a turnout of about 39.9 percent -- the previous record-low turnout.
Honolulu, which had a contested mayor's race and several contested Senate and House races, had the highest turnout of 41.2 percent for this year's primary.
Maui, where there was not a mayor's race, had the lowest turnout of 19,985 voters out of 75,096 registered --- about 26.6 percent.
BACK TO TOP |
3 in 5 eligible voters stay away
Voter turnout in Hawaii primary elections dating to 2000:
Year | Turnout | % 2004 248,683 39.7 2002 274,517 41.1 2000 250,848 39.9 SOURCE: STATE OFFICE OF ELECTIONS
