President Donald Trump is reportedly considering an Executive Order to put a stop to mail-in voting, per a New York Times article carried by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser Monday.
Who knows if that will be binding, election law is largely left to the states. But I've been arguing for five years that Hawai‘i should fix the mess it created with all mail-in voting, on the grounds that what we've had since can't truly be called elections at all.
If you were to call them what they've really been, they're direct-mail marketing surveys. And they're about as trustworthy.
Let me back up for a quick history:
Back in 2019, then Gov. David Ige signed into law a bill to make Hawai‘i a mail-in state, commencing with the 2020 election. At the time, Hawai‘i would have been one of only four states doing mail-in voting, as reported at U.S News & World Reports, but then the Covid lockdowns were inflicted on the country and states went wild with mail-in voting. That has since been made permanent by law in eight states, with provisions for mail-in voting by county in two others.
The argument, in 2019, was that mail-in voting would be the cure for Hawai‘i's dismal voting turnout. We've had two presidential elections since then to put that to the test, and hardly ordinary ones, in terms of how much emotion and intensity has surrounded the candidates. If anything was going to boost our numbers, standing with, or standing against, Trump should've done it.
But, no. Hawai‘i's 2024 turnout of 60% in the general election was the lowest in our entire history of statehood. And that's with the Trump effect in play, which arguably did motivate people to participate. Can't imagine what turnout would've been for elections with less heat, but certainly nothing to prove that mail-in voting boosted turnout.
2020's turnout in the general of 69% was an improvement over 2016's 58%, but that didn't last, and 69% was not much better than in any general election from 1996 to 2016, during which turnout ranged from a low of 58% to a high of 67%.
You can see Hawai'i's voter turnout here. For our first presidential election in 1960, it was 93%.
So, all mail-in voting failed at its stated purpose. Now about my contention that such elections aren't true elections.
I have written about this in 2020, 2022 and 2024 in my former gig at Pacific Business News, so to summarize: What makes an election an election isn't the ballot. It's the voting booth.
The voting booth is where the citizen goes, in state-sponsored safety and security, to vote their conscience, privately, anonymously. Out in the world, where the ballots are currently mailed, people face pressure about their votes, from family, friends, peers, coworkers, bosses, etc. They may face pressure to prove they're voting "the right way" by showing their ballot to those people. In really bad situations, they may not even get to fill out the ballot themselves.
One can imagine an overbearing spouse demanding control of a person's ballot. One can imagine an unscrupulous employer saying, "Everyone bring in your ballots, we'll fill them out for you. It's important that so-and-so win!"
I don't have to prove this has happened. It's obvious that could happen, and the state set things up to allow it, in pursuit of convenience.
It is not the state's job to provide convenient elections. It is the state's job to provide secure elections. That means voting booths, for everyone, as the default.
Sure, the canvas booths always smelled of mildew, but that, my friends, was the smell of freedom.
Then there are the reliability concerns and the chain of custody concerns. The state claims to validate the signatures on the mail-in ballots, but that signature is on the envelope and proves nothing, nor is any voter's ID checked, so we have no way of knowing who really filled out the ballot.
(By the way, the State of Hawai‘i has us sign the outside of the envelopes. Isn't that great? Your full, legal signature out there for anyone to see or copy. Has the state never heard of identity theft?)
Chain of custody? I've argued that when the State of Hawai‘i certifies election results now, it's a legal fiction thanks to mail-in voting. The officials simply cannot know what they used to know when the state retained possession of the ballots the entire time, except for the brief minutes the ballots were in our hands to vote. They're certifying the work of a process they don't own or control.
That process includes the U.S. Postal Service. We need to trust it as a neutral third party that will deliver the ballots on time to everyone then back to the state. In 2022, that didn't happen. As we saw in 2022, more than 3,000 ballots arrived too late to be counted in Hawai‘i — and who can know when "too late" is, with the post office?
As for neutral, the American Postal Workers Union (AAPWU) is anything but. It endorses candidates. It hardly matters who they endorse, no one trusted with handling all the ballots should be picking a side. But I'll say this much — if the union had endorsed Trump, you wouldn't even be reading this column because the Legislature would've undone mail-in voting on the spot.
I'm aware that the Hawaiʻi State Elections Commission is investigating allegations of irregularities in the 2024 general election for Kaua‘i voters. Clearly, there's a problem. To me, the problems all began when we forgot what elections were supposed to be — a ballot in a booth, not a survey in the mail.
A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team. He can be reached at kam@alohastatedaily.com.
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A. Kam Napier can be reached at kam@alohastatedaily.com.
