Does Hawaii Have Fair Elections? An Investigation by Mikki Willis

➡ There are concerns about Hawaii’s election system, with some claiming it lacks integrity and transparency. Thousands of ballots were reportedly unaccounted for in the 2024 election, leading to disputes between election officials and the commission overseeing the system. Despite allegations of mishandling and mismatched tallies, the chief election officer maintains there’s no evidence of systemic error or fraud. The tension has led to calls for the removal of the chief election officer, but these have been unsuccessful so far.
➡ The article discusses concerns about the integrity of Hawaii’s election system, highlighting issues such as unverifiable electronic voting, potential tampering, and lack of transparency. It mentions instances of questionable voting records and the inability to audit sealed election dockets. The article suggests solutions like returning to same-day in-person voting, conducting independent audits, and using paper ballots. It emphasizes the importance of citizen participation to combat corruption and ensure a fair election system.

Aloha mai kakou. This is your wake-up call. All the change you wish to see will not be possible until our broken election system is fixed. And no one has the ability to make that system pono. But you, it’s time to rise and shine. Hawaii’s mail-in voting system works and is here to stay. That was the message today from several state lawmakers after the election commission voted to get rid of it, citing a lack of election integrity. Thousands of ballots across the state unaccounted for in the 2024 election. Our elections should have the same standards as the financial institution.

There’s nothing even close. There’s nothing verifiable about how many ballots were being collected. I can’t let this go. This is the foundation of our democracy. I need to know that we’re having fair elections and I couldn’t live with myself if I looked the other way and said, oh well. We’re less than a year away from the 2026 elections. And there are mounting tensions and disputes between election officials and even on the very commission that oversees the system. So there is no independent way to verify the results. And that’s what we’re exposing for the people to see on our elections commission meetings.

Good morning. It’s 10 o’clock. I’d like to call the elections commission meeting to order. Ralph. If 19,000 envelopes were missing, would we be able to tell that they were not missing? They were not missing. Stop. Do I have the border or false? Do I have the floor? If you’re truthful, if 19,000 ballots are missing and there’s no count reported when the envelopes were transferred, how would we identify that? We would go back to the statewide voter registration system where those ballots were accepted and verified against that. Who besides you verifies the SVRS? The counties also do it as well as the Office of Elections.

The counties do not do that. The election commissioners, starting with Ralph Cushney, who brought this to attention, put tremendous amount of effort and time over a two-year period to try to get some resolution and clarity as to what’s happening. They’ve gotten nowhere. The commission is also looking into allegations of ballot mishandling and mismatched tallies on both Kauai and Hawaii Island. Critics say the differences are in the thousands. The chief election officer says it’s in the dozens, saying in a recent letter to the commission, ballot count discrepancies are mischaracterized and that their records show minimal discrepancies across counties and no evidence of systemic error or fraud.

So the Office of Elections is responsible for all of the elections that take place in our state and it’s led by Scott Nago, which is our chief election officer. Where the elections commission comes in is we are the body that keeps the Office of Elections accountable. Scott Nago has been in his position for well over 12 years, despite lower voter turnout, despite lack of confidence in our election system. On any other job, that person would get turned over and removed. The election commission calls it a perfect storm, one that ended with a shortage of ballots during last November’s general election.

But as Dry Cunningham reports, it says there’s no reason to fire the election’s chief, Scott Nago. Scott is retained as chief election officer. That’s the decision of the state elections commission after a special investigation into November’s election blunder. Disputes over ballot handling and access to in-person voting have gone past the boiling point at the elections commission. Some members of the board are calling for Scott Nago to be fired. So the process to remove the chief election officer happens in an evaluation. Of course, our commission is a partisan commission where you have a majority party representative from each island and a minority party representative on each island.

And to me, it’s clear that one party is protecting the chief election officer and refusing to remove him. The commission has fought to put it behind closed doors and to take it into executive session. When you move something into executive session, now there’s no public record of it. When we were evaluating Scott Nago and the commission was voting to give him a race, I proposed that we tell the public how much and we disclose the voting record. Motion failed. Let’s keep it from the public and carry on. So in February of 2024, the commission voted to not reappoint him and that motion failed.

The deputy attorney general ruled because that failed that he was automatically reappointed. He did not get a majority vote and the deputy attorney general ruled that he was reappointed. And that shows you the headwinds that we’re up against. You know, we have all these people come out to give public testimony asking the commission meeting after meeting to remove Scott Nago. Holding election officials accountable to the law is not partisan. It is a fundamental safeguard to ensure that every lawful vote is protected. The statistical probability of being this wrong this many times in this many self-serving ways is effectively zero.

Scott Nago, after being questioned by Senator Mike Gabbard, lied on testimony under oath. I wheeled five record boxes into the commission meeting showing what we found in the 2022 election. There’s almost 17,000 pages of documentation that were provided by the office of elections saying that these were the documents they used to validate the 2022 election. Two of those boxes were blank forms and half of the forms that had places where observer signatures were required were missing. In 2022 Mr. Nago signed the certificates of election for the governor and lieutenant governor before the election was ever certified.

So let that sink in. My philosophy is that everything rises and falls with leadership and that’s absolutely true for our elections commission. Our current chair, for whatever reason, will show clear favoritism and other commissioners like myself and my colleague Ralph Cushney, he’ll treat like we’re conspiracy theorists. There are other commissioners who are trying to speak. They’ll be recognized as appropriate. Right now you’re violating rule 1.48. A person is entitled to full participation in his proceedings. You’re not allowing anyone to talk. You’re out of order now. You do it again. I’ll evict you from the meeting.

The motion was made and seconded. You’re out of order twice. The motion was made. You’re out of the meeting. The chair freaked out. They stopped the meeting. They turned off the cameras and they had two undercover police officers take me out of the building. People don’t act like that if they’re not hiding something. A common quote from some commissioners like don’t question what’s going on. You’re going to destroy faith in democracy, faith in our elections. It’s already been destroyed. People just don’t vote in Hawaii because they don’t believe in the integrity of our elections.

I think if that continues, we’ll see the same pattern. The public frustrated a chief election officer who doesn’t see this commission as his actual oversight and simply an advisory board. I moved to have the chief elections officer produce the transfer logs used when the county of Hawaii delivered ballots to the state counting center before the next meeting. But he’s asking for envelope count, which they did not do at that for that election. An envelope count was never done at the Hawaii county clerk’s office prior to transporting those envelopes to the state.

Is that what you’re saying? We see that as an inventory issue rather than obtain a custody issue. So this is the discrepancy. Yes, he can provide that log, but it isn’t an actual ballot count. That’s correct. From the county to the state. Any more discussion on this motion? So how this works is when you drop off your ballot, it’s brought to the county counting centers and the county clerks are inputting the amount of ballots into the statewide voter registration system. And then the state also is inputting what gets turned into them.

And so what we were investigating is how can we independently audit the S V R S to look at all this documentation that could verify the numbers. All of those requests were denied to us. And so for me and for you, that should be an issue. How can we just trust that the S V R S is getting accurate numbers. They went through 12 different processes to try to find out if they could get some type of audit or some type of reconciliation as to what truly happened. They were blocked every single time.

The audits are done with a ballot image. And so there’s no physical verification of the number of envelopes or the number of ballots anywhere in the process. So as we see in the case of the big Allen, they collected 57,000 ballots and then the state has electronic records showing that they counted 76,000 ballots. So there were 19,000 ballots added electronically. The reason that’s so important that piece of paper that we fill out that we give to the elections division is the only thing that connects us to the voting results. Every single drop box is supposed to have a log by an independent observer documenting how many ballots they have picked up at that location.

Even took it a step further to request receipts from the U S P S. Again, it doesn’t match beyond this. One of the constituents on the big Allen asked the county, why is there this discrepancy and the official response from the county clerk? Sometimes the U S P S doesn’t provide us receipts. We’re trusting the U S P S with our entire election system and they can’t provide receipts. In our last meeting, Scott and August said the only way to verify the S V R S counts of the envelopes was to count the envelopes.

Now the deputy attorney general is telling us we cannot unseal the envelopes. When you read the federal law and state law and our rules in conjunction with each other, it requires these election dockets to be sealed. And although our rules do allow for subsequent audits to be conducted, it unequivocally states that the containers or cabinets shall be sealed and stored for 22 months in accordance with the federal law. So if there is an unsealing, it would be after that. That’s two years gone by of someone serving in elected office that may have never even been elected.

Marine earned the top spot for votes received by a Hawaii gubernatorial candidate ever at nearly 260,000. When you’re telling the public to trust an electronic system and that it can’t be verified immediately, that’s cause for questions to be raised. After 22 months, they can destroy the records. So what’s the purpose of keeping them if we can’t look at it? Our elections are run by another company. It’s not run by the state. It is run by heart inter civic. When we asked to see how the ballots are counted in an electronic system, he says it’s proprietary information that he does not have access to.

This is a contractor that’s out of Austin, Texas. They in turn are saying that everything that goes into this computer is fine. But we know that all of these different computers can be hacked easily. I cannot say that this machine cannot be tampered with after all my votes have gone into it. But Nago ensures that the machines are kept safe through election day. What we do is we seal each individual machine with a wire. In 2018, electronic voting machines in Georgia and Texas deleted votes for certain candidates or switch votes from one candidate to another.

We brought in folks who before our eyes hacked election machines. Even hackers with limited prior knowledge tools and resources are able to breach voting machines in a matter of minutes. These tabulators can be hacked remotely. And I have seen it personally. I’ve worked with an international group on election integrity and these tabulators have back doors. Elections here in Hawaii is in crisis. Automated systems are not reliable unless we can verify the actual results. And that’s the problem with Hawaii is that we don’t have a verifiable audit system. How did my dad vote in the 2020 election? I was pretty surprised because he had a brain hemorrhage in 2019.

He doesn’t remember our names, but yet he voted in the 2020 election. They said they don’t have any records of the signature and that verify that makes sure somebody voted. That process is flawed and they need to fix it. God Nago himself said that there’s over 100,000 people on our dead voter rolls, which means they have either passed on their deceased or they moved to a different state. They’re at the wrong address. One of the testifiers in our commission meeting testified to this. So I was an observer in the state counting center on Kauai and those envelopes came in open trays.

They didn’t come in a sealed anything. I believe the three counties did seal it. Kauai the elections commission has asked for a third party audit and we were given the line that there was no money for that. So we asked the state auditor, the legislature has to direct him to conduct an audit. We sent a letter to the Senate president and the speaker of the house asking for an audit. You know, last month we learned that the state auditor did not feel compelled. And auditors, no response from them. It doesn’t seem like any of them are motivated either.

So they never appropriated money or even introduced legislation to conduct an audit. They just passed legislation making it harder for us to remove the chief election software. So what do you actually have? You have state auditors auditing state government. What is the outcome? Exactly what they want. Most people know that Hawaii has the dubious distinction of being the most corrupt state of the nation. That’s hard to imagine in the fact that the governor of the state of Hawaii is the most powerful governor in the nation. He now uses his own executive authority to govern the state outside the legislative branch.

This authority allows him to appoint the attorney general, the sheriff, the judiciary, every department head, every deputy department head. And so because you have these things in place, you have the ability to govern and constrain information. If you want to remain in Hawaii’s political power, you do what the governor said. The construct of the constitution is supposed to give us a representative form of government. And if we don’t have a representative form of government, we don’t have a country. And that representative form of government comes through elections. And the only way we’re going to change this trajectory is for the people to get more interested in this problem.

How much is it going to take to get to a point where the people care enough about their own elections and hold the people who’ve been responsible for executing this scheme accountable? Because we don’t have an election system in the United States right now. We have a selection system. So if I had a magic wand to solve all of this and get us on the right track with our elections, the first thing I would do is return us to same day in-person voting. The second thing I would do is order an external independent audit of our elections from every count.

The last thing I would do, remove Scott Nago as the chief election officer and put someone else in place. Another option is that we go to paper ballots. And that would be of the highest integrity. We can avoid all of the digital. All we have to do is get our own scanner for the county so that they can go over the paper ballots that are saved for 22 months. Every avenue that we’ve taken to get things corrected has either been delayed, deferred, or ignored. And if everything was true and in order, they would just simply open up the boxes and show us.

Apathy has set in because they don’t believe their vote actually matters. We want people to know that their vote is their voice, and their voice will determine their inheritance and their legacy. This is the call to re-engage, to get people to come out of the stands, out of the bleachers, onto the field, back in life, understanding that the only antidote to public corruption is citizen participation. And you know, it’s up to me and you to raise our voices. I would encourage you, get involved on a local level. We are representing the people and saying, this needs to change.

But when those things are completely ignored, that’s actually where we lose democracy. So here you have it. This is what it’s about. Big money interest who serves their interest and needs instead of our community. We must do something about it. My dad always said, Aloha ke kahi ike kahi, which means to love one another and at a deeper level to respect one another. Hawaii is not Hawaii without the people. We just want to make this the best place for our families. All the change you wish to see will not be possible until our broken election system is fixed.

And no one has the ability to make that system pono but you. It’s time to rise and shine. Thank you. [tr:trw].