The state Elections Commission will meet next month to discuss ballot problems on election day that led to long lines and frustrated voters across Oahu.
It’s not yet clear what action the commission could take at the meeting, or whether it will simply defer decision-making to a later date.
The meeting will take place the week of Dec. 10.
Commission Chairman William Marston said a memo Friday to the body from Chief Election Officer Scott Nago “will be the crux” of the discussion at the meeting.
The four-page memo includes a more detailed explanation of the series of circumstances that led to at least 70 Oahu polling places running short or running out of paper ballots on Nov. 6.
In the memo, Nago concludes the shortage of ballots “was the result of a deficient model used for ordering ballots, a failure to follow the safeguards that exist to modify the order or to reallocate existing ballots prior to Election Day and a failure to deploy additional ballots in a timely manner on Election Day.”
NAGO has previously made similar statements to the news media.
But the memo makes clear that the problems could have been avoided, even days before the election.
He said absentee mail-in and early walk-in voting was “not properly monitored in the days leading up to the general election.”
If it had been, Nago concluded, election officials would have seen several precincts had low early voting tallies and “that the deployment of the reserve ballots to the precincts … would be appropriate.”
He added, “It would have also caused us to review whether there was a systemic problem with the model used to order ballots.”
In all, 24 polling places on Oahu ran out of ballots on election day. Reports from polling places that ballots were running low started rolling in at about 10 a.m.
The ballot shortages happened even though voter turnout was down from the presidential election four years ago.
About 62 percent of Hawaii registered voters — or about 436,000 people — cast ballots, according to the state Office of Elections, compared with 66 percent in 2008, or about 456,000 people.
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