The Hawaii Supreme Court pressed election officials Tuesday for information on late-arriving absentee ballots in a dispute over Trevor Ozawa’s 22-vote victory in November for a seat on the Honolulu City Council.

Ozawa’s win over Tommy Waters in the East Honolulu race has yet to be certified, which has led to a standstill at the City Council.

If Ozawa is certified, he likely will be elected City Council chairman, and the nine-member Council would continue to have a five-member majority that often opposes Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s policies.

If the results are reversed and Waters wins the seat, the Council majority would swing to Caldwell supporters.

The outcome could influence Council decisions on the continuing rail project, the rapid spread of vacation rentals and the proliferation of monster houses.

The Supreme Court justices said they want answers regarding absentee mail-in ballots that were received by election officials after 6 p.m. on Election Day. The court is giving election officials until 4:30 p.m. today to respond.

Waters believes that no votes received by election officials after 6 p.m. should have been counted.

Waters was shown to be leading Ozawa by 72 votes following the so-called “fourth printout” at 11:23 p.m. The final printout, which was released after midnight and is believed to have included 1,286 absentee mail-in ballots from East Honolulu, gave Ozawa the 22-vote win. The count was 18,358 votes for Ozawa and 18,336 for Waters.

Waters, in his original Nov. 26 Supreme Court complaint, said, “The illegal manner in which the ballots included in the fifth printout were collected and tabulated constituted an error, mistake or irregularity that would change the outcome of the election.” There should have at least been a manual audit, his complaint said.

In its two-page order Tuesday, the court said it is giving election officials until the end of the day today to answer the specific question of whether “any mail-in absentee return envelopes received, collected, or ‘swept’ by the United States Postal Service after 6:00 p.m. on November 6, 2018 were set aside and not counted in accordance with law, and whether any absentee mail-in return envelopes received, collected or ‘swept’ by the United States Postal Service after 6:00 p.m. on November 6, 2018 were not set aside and subsequently counted.”

Both the state Office of Elections and Honolulu Office of the City Clerk previously had responded to questions in an earlier order from the Supreme Court seeking more information from election officials. They said nothing was done differently this election from previous elections.

The state’s four election offices are tasked with collecting absentee mail-in votes and then verifying the signatures on the outer envelopes. Actual opening of the ballot envelopes and the subsequent counting of those ballots, however, is done by state election employees at the state Capitol.

On Oahu the signature verification process is done at the city Elections Division’s facility at Koapaka Street near the airport.

City Clerk Glen Takahashi, in a Dec. 6 filing, said the process for collecting and later counting absentee mail-in ballots in this election was similar to previous elections.

Honolulu Elections Administrator Rex Quidilla, in a court declaration, said that under its agreement with local U.S. Postal Serv­ice officials, USPS personnel conducted “a final ‘sweep’ of its Honolulu airport processing plant at 6 p.m. on election day so as to ensure that all mail absentee return envelopes are collected and received by the close of polls.”

Arrangements were made with USPS to allow clerks’ office staff to pick up at 6:30 p.m., and again at 7:30 p.m. if necessary, absentee votes collected during the 6 p.m. sweep, Quidilla said.

Meanwhile, completed absentee mail-in ballots were physically dropped off through 6 p.m. Election Day at precincts across Oahu. They were placed by precinct workers into specially marked packets which were placed in a “precinct can” with other voting materials, Quidilla said. Those cans were transported to the Capitol where state election workers separated their contents. This was completed at 9 p.m., he said.

The packets with mail-in ballots then were transported by city election workers to the Koapaka Street facility for signature verification before being sent back to the Capitol for counting.

A similar challenge to the Ozawa-Waters results was filed by a group of East Honolulu voters. The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued the same order in that case.

Acting Council Chairwoman Kymberly Pine said Tuesday the Council — with either eight or nine members — will meet Monday to pick leaders so it can continue its business. Pine said her druthers would be for Ozawa to be certified and seated by the time the Council reconvenes. If that’s the case, she said, she will carry through with an earlier commitment to support him as Council chairman.

She said if Ozawa cannot take his seat and only eight members are seated, she will recommend to colleagues that they pick Councilwoman Ann Koba­yashi, who’s spent more time as a Council member than anyone else currently on the Council, to serve as acting chairwoman.

“She is the mother of the Council, and there’s no better time to select a mother to lead us,” Pine said. “All the Council members will know this is temporary because once you add another person, it could change the dynamics of the group.”

After that the Council should be able to finalize committee assignments, she said. Council staff have already drawn up a calendar of full Council and committee members for all of 2019. It only needs to be approved, Pine said.

Council members tried to wait for a Supreme Court decision, “but we have run out of time,” she said. “We held out for as long as we can.”

The delays caused by the challenge “have resulted in over 100,000 people (in East Honolulu) not being represented,” Pine said, adding that she will ask the Legislature to change state law to require the court to expedite rulings on election challenges.

Pine said she doesn’t want to be chairwoman herself because she would prefer to continue chairing the Zoning Committee. That committee has been busy with meaty issues including comprehensive measures governing residential vacation rentals and so-called monster houses.

Ozawa, in a statement, said, “I continue to believe in the integrity of the election process and I am continuing to work hard for the people of District 4.”