Hawaii Democrats won’t have Iowa’s caucus problem, says head of state party

Hawaii Democrats will use a new mail-in balloting process and a new ranked-choice voting system to poll party members on who they want to be the next president of the United States, but interim Hawaii Democratic Party Chairwoman Kate Stanley said she does not expect to see anything like the problems on Monday that threw the Iowa caucuses into turmoil.

Hawaii does not have an open primary system, which means voters here can participate in presidential preference balloting only if they are registered to vote and have enrolled as members of the state Democratic Party.

The presidential preference voting in Hawaii is run by the state party and restricted to party members as it is in Iowa, but the mechanics of the voting in the two state systems are quite different, Stanley said.

“We are doing a mail ballot,” Stanley said. “We are not meeting in rooms and dividing up and counting people with volunteers.” Hawaii Democrats also won’t be using the mobile app that is being blamed for problems in the Iowa election, she said.

In Hawaii, party members will have their ballots mailed to their home addresses. Party members who fail to mark and mail their ballots on time can walk into 21 sites statewide to vote with a paper ballot on April 4, which is the last day of voting. All of the ballots will then be taken to one counting site to be tabulated, she said.

Both the mail balloting and the centralized counting system are new, and “in anything new, things can happen,” Stanley said. “Do we anticipate major problems? Absolutely not, because we’ve been working on this.”

She said the party has contracted with Merriman River Group to run the election. Since mail-in voting is easier than showing up at a precinct gathering, state Democrats expect a larger-than-normal turnout of 55,000 or more Hawaii party members to participate this year.

That would be considerably more than the 33,716 Democrats who cast ballots in 2016. Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders easily defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Hawaii presidential preference voting that year.

Hawaii Democrats will be able to choose from candidates including front-runners Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Also included on the Hawaii ballot will be Minnesota U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Hawaii U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, technology entrepreneur Andrew Yang, hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, former Maryland U.S. Rep John Delaney and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.