Disconnect with moneyed interests turns off voters

James Koshiba and a number of volunteers with the citizen-action nonprofit Kanu Hawaii have been going door to door this election season, but they’re not campaigning for any single candidate. Their outreach is a campaign for voters, given that Hawaii now has the worst record of voter turnout in the nation.

Early voting and absentee balloting does help, said Koshiba, Kanu’s executive director, but increasing the voting options and convenience is only a small segment of the turnout solution. Part of the organization’s pro-democracy project this year was a questionnaire pressing for reasons why people don’t vote.

More details about the project is available online at a site (HawaiiCandidates.info) hosted by Kanu.

The problem, Koshiba said, is not that people don’t care.

"We were at the top of the list for voter turnout for 40 years," he said. "And for a decade after statehood we had turnout over 75 percent. Now it’s below half … and that’s not due to the fact that voting got harder.

"Over the last four decades, people have gotten more frustrated, cynical and really disappointed about politics and government as a way to make change."

The inconvenience of voting does stop some people, but for many more the complaint was the lack of reliable data on the issues and the candidates.

"Part of the problem is information — they said, ‘I don’t want to just check a box,’" he added. "These are people who are used to having stuff like that at their fingertips. And they’re skeptical of canned information."

And then there’s the sense that monied interests have overrun the whole process, he said.

"One thing that we heard at the door a lot was about campaign ads, stuff that insulted people’s intelligence," Koshiba added. "They think, ‘Politics is for people who have an axe to grind, an issue to push and the money to do it — it’s not for me.’"