In an apples-to-apples comparison, Hawaii voter turnout declined again in this year’s primary election in both the percentage of people who participated and the raw number of people who voted as compared with 2014, according to state statistics.
Hawaii had 3,357 fewer people voting in the primary this year than in 2014 despite the fact that the state population has grown in the past four years. Turnout was 38.6 percent of registered voters this year, a decrease of almost 3 percentage points from 2014.
The number of voters who participated in this year’s primary dropped on Kauai and Oahu as compared with 2014, while it increased slightly on Maui and Hawaii island.
Voter turnout was slightly higher in this year’s primary than it was in 2016, but the more valid comparison is between the 2014 and 2018 primaries because those were nonpresidential election years with hotly contested primary races for governor, according to Colin Moore, director of the Public Policy Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Turnout in the 2016 primary was low in part because the general public cannot vote in primary election contests for president in Hawaii.
Instead, Democrats and Republicans hold party caucuses to choose their presidential favorites, which meant that the 2016 primary “really wasn’t all that important of an election,” Moore said. “We did have a primary but there wasn’t much at stake.”
Voter turnout in Hawaii has been a problem for some time, and Hawaii ranked among the bottom five states in the nation for turnout in the past three presidential elections, according to “America Goes to the Polls 2016,” a report by Nonprofit VOTE and the U.S. Elections Project.
The report found the most common reasons people gave for failing to vote nationally were a lack of competition and meaningful choices on the ballot, or problems with their voter registration or getting to the polls.
The study found that a dozen of the top 20 states for voter turnout were so-called battleground states in 2016, meaning they were seen as pivotal in the presidential election that year and were the focus of political advertising and other campaign activities during the national election.
Gov. David Ige predicted before this year’s primary election that voter turnout would be relatively low this year, partly because he thought voters might be turned off by a flood of negative advertising and partly because there were so many uncontested seats in the 76-member state Legislature.
“There are a lot of unopposed races in House and Senate, and every contest brings voters, so that fact that there are many, I just have a concern,” Ige said before the voting. Fifteen Democrats and one Republican in the state House were unopposed this year, and state Sen. Breene Harimoto was unopposed in the Senate.
Moore said Hawaii is unique because it used to be a high-turnout state but has become a low-turnout state.
“Most of the time low-turnout states remain low-turnout states. High-turnout states like Minnesota, which is consistently the highest, are always high. So, we’re kind of in the unique position of falling apart, which is strange and hard to explain,” he said.
State Chief Election Officer Scott Nago said most of the barriers to voting have been lifted in Hawaii. The state adopted statewide same-day voter registration this year, and mail-in absentee voting is easier than ever, he said.
“I really don’t know why people aren’t voting,” he said. “It’s not like services are not available.”
The state will test out all-mail voting on Kauai in 2020, and “I don’t know what’s left to do to make turnout go up,” Nago said.
Moore said people vote because they see it as their civic duty, and “Hawaii really kind of has this crisis of civic engagement. That’s primarily what explains it. We’ve done all these things such as same-day registration and mail-in voting, and they don’t really seem to help.”
When people fail to vote, “all that does is basically favor the status quo, and if folks are unhappy with the ruling Democratic Party in Hawaii, which they are — every poll suggests that they are, even if they’re not going to vote for Republicans — by not voting all they do is sort of give them a blank check, which is unfortunate,” he said.
