The election’s clear winner — voting by mail — should be implemented statewide

The primary election is complete and one question has been answered. I can’t talk about who won or lost because this column had to be written before the Saturday election, but I already know one thing.

Hawaii voters are just more in love than ever with voting by mail.

It was two years ago that election officials saw more voters going to the mailbox, not the ballot box, to do their civic duty.

Last week, as absentee voting was wrapping up, Honolulu City Clerk Glen Takahashi was still marveling at how vote-by-mail has become the political way to go for Hawaii’s voters.

On the penultimate Friday in July, Takahashi and crew mailed out ballots and by Monday, 10,000 came back. That puts the “hurry-up-and-vote” crowd at 10,000, because on Saturday they knew who they wanted and put their ballots in the mail immediately.

Scott Nago, state election chief, who is starting his 21st year working in Hawaii elections, said as of last Thursday, 132,000 had already voted across the state. Nago said 80,645 vote-by-mail absentee ballots had been returned out of 157,252 sent to permanently registered absentee voters, with the remaining voters walking in to county polling places.

The popularity of voting-by-mail was also proved as Honolulu officials last week calculated that this year, that method of voting was up 15 percent compared with 2016.

While it is obvious that voting-by-mail is more popular than voting on a specific Saturday in August, Hawaii’s political leaders have refused to accept its popularity. Four years in a row, the Legislature brought various vote-by-mail bills all the way past House and Senate votes, up to a conference committee decision, then dropped the issue. This is obviously a way to torment and kill fight, teasing the citizen advocates who are asking for more voting access, making them fight for it year after year and then walking away from the table.

This year, by setting up a trial universal vote-by-mail test for Kauai in 2018, the Legislature gave the citizen groups scraps.

Off the record, voting officials are saying such a test is meaningless. Kauai does not have the sophisticated voting equipment that Honolulu possesses.

Although local campaigns have yet to ask for it, Honolulu officials are scanning ballots as they come in and can actually tell you if someone has voted within days of getting the mailing.

On the mainland that is the sort of sophisticated political intelligence that campaigns can use to email and text their supporters to hurry up and vote.

The foot-dragging and passive-aggressive stance by the Legislature shows that politicians have no interest in encouraging all citizens to vote.

Happily, citizen groups such as Common Cause are not dropping the fight for vote-by-mail; they are learning to link arms with other community groups and fight for the right to vote.

“More and more folks are voting by mail and that does mean we are heading this way anyway, and we should adapt these policies now, to meet the people, voters where they are,” Corie Tanida, Common Cause Hawaii’s executive director, said in an interview. “I think more groups understand how improving our elections systems benefits everyone and is connected with their specific issues.”

Everyone on the state and county operations levels are ready for statewide vote-by-mail. Only the Legislature is holding it back.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.