News item: OLYMPIA, Wash. » Facebook users in Washington state will have something else to brag about to their online friends: that they registered to vote on Facebook.

The USA Today piece goes on to note that Washington started online voter registration in 2008 and this week goes even further by allowing voter registration via Facebook. Reportedly candidates or other voters won’t be "friending" those who register and the system will be secure.

Here in Hawaii, the story is different and predictably a lot slower.

Hawaii is planning for online voter registration in 2016, just in time for the next presidential election.

The Legislature approved on-line voting last year, but Gov. Abercrombie vetoed it, saying no money was included to set up the program. The Legislature came back this year with $500,000 and Abercrombie signed the bill into law.

"We should be doing more," said veteran Speaker of the House Calvin Say, in an interview.

Say figures the state has done a good job of making the absentee ballot program accessible, but more could be done. Hawaii is riding the national trend toward vote by mail via an absentee ballot. In 2010, 23 percent of Hawaii voters took an absentee ballot in the general election.

According to national statistics, just the act of voting in Hawaii remains below average. When election time rolls around, we are just not so into voting.

In 2010, the national average, according to the respected United States Election Project, was 41 percent. Hawaii was at 39.8 percent and those Washington show-offs with their fancy online registration were at 53.2 percent. The best state was Minnesota at 55.4 percent.

"It is disappointing to see the voter listings; look at the registration," Say said, adding that it is likely that only 150,000 voters out of about 464,000 possible voters will be selecting the next Honolulu mayor.

Not everyone shares Say’s concerns. Senate President Shan Tsutsui said in an interview that the state is moving ahead.

"Over the last few years, voter registration has gotten easier, easy to walk in, easier to fill it out and mail it in. Plus there are ‘get out the vote’ drives. We have done a lot from the traditional ‘only vote on election day’ times," Tsutsui said.

Those days did, however, produce better voter turnout numbers. Hawaii’s elections used to be run by the lieutenant governor’s office. Every two years there was a ritualistic denial that politics was creeping into the state-run elections, and a grumbling echo from the GOP that security wasn’t good enough.

Still, because the LG is an elected post, the officer holder would compete to get more voters to the polls. Perhaps the most competitive was former Gov. John Waihee, who spent hundreds of thousands in state money to work up interest. Something must have worked because the Hawaii turnout in 1986 was 82 percent, double today’s lousy numbers.

Unofficially there is a lot of concern that this year will again see low turnout numbers. The final figures for voter registration won’t be available until Monday, but according to Glen Takahashi with the city clerk’s office, voter registration is up slightly on Hawaii island at 101,000 and on Oahu with 461,000. But registered voters on Maui and Kauai are expected to be about the same.

Nikki Love, Hawaii Common Cause executive director, estimated in testimony during hearings for the online registration bill that "there are an estimated 961,213 eligible voters in Hawaii, but only 690,748 registered voters. That leaves an estimated 270,465 potential voters — 28 percent of those eligible — who were not registered at the time of the 2010 election.

Absentee ballots are expected to go into the mail next week; the election is Aug. 11. You can take a peek at your ballot by clicking the "locator" button and searching for your address at Hawaii.gov/elections.

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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.