When Honolulu City Clerk Glen Takahashi drops a letter in the mail, it is a big deal.

This Friday he and his city staff will be sending 145,000 letters. If you are registered to vote and you are on the permanent absentee voter list, expect to be getting your absentee ballot sometime shortly after July 20, courtesy of Takahashi and his three fellow neighbor island county clerks.

With any luck, this may be one of the last times Hawaii holds both a walk-in and mail-in election. Elections in the four counties holding just a mail-in election means a saving of around at least $1 million per election.

“It looks like 2018 is going to be similar to past elections,” Takahashi said in an interview last week.

Voter registration is expected to increase and vote-by-mail is the preferred way to go in Hawaii.

“We are seeing increases compared to years past, and more and more people are picking up on the early voting way. They find it convenient,” Takahashi said.

In the primary election two years ago, 96,206 Hawaii voters went to the polls, while a total of 156,519 mailed in an absentee ballot.

This is a trend so obvious that even the state Legislature, which three years in a row let a vote-by-mail proposal die in conference committee, finally this year took a teensy step toward making walk-in balloting all but disappear.

The Legislature unanimously passed and Gov. David Ige last week signed House Bill 1409 into law.

The new law calls for an exclusive vote-by-mail election to be held during the 2020 primary and general elections on Kauai.

The bill duly notes “that Hawaii’s conversion to elections by mail would significantly reduce the logistical issues related to conducting elections at polling places.”

Kauai has the state’s smallest county voter base and the Legislature wanted to go as slow as possible with the experiment.

The catch with the new law is that there is nothing requiring the state to then continue the experiment or simply just take what was learned and then fully implement statewide vote-by-mail, but at least there is a chance.

The plan has safeguards, including the requirement that the county create a special voting center that would be open 10 days before the election for people who want to go to an official polling place, or have special needs or want to register to vote.

After the Kauai ballots are counted, at 6 p.m. the results will be announced. No waiting around for the first, second or third print-out. Six o’clock is it, election pau.

The county will not have to put out fliers and beg citizens to staff polling places, citizens won’t be cajoled into volunteering to audit polling books, and the state and county will be starting the process of saving money.

And just maybe the state will then allow the 2022 election to be 100 percent vote-by-mail, with an official ballot being mailed to every voter in Hawaii. A new day, far in the future.

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