The Hawai‘i Elections Commission has requested the state to audit the results of the state 2024 election.
For the last several months, the commission has conducted a series of investigations into the ballot tabulations processes on all islands following the 2024 elections. Those investigations allegedly turned up a repeated lack of transparency that makes much of the election data unverifiable.
According to an August report by a group of commissioners, the Office of Elections repeatedly denied requests for data or a third-party inspection of voting machines.
Without access to that data — which includes images of ballots themselves, and the audit documentation used to certify the results of the election — and without an inspection, the report states that the commission cannot confirm simple facts such as whether the number of ballots reported by the Office of Elections matches the number of ballots cast in reality.
Confirming the number of ballots is particularly important, given that ballot counts from Kaua‘i and Hawai‘i counties were inconsistent, according to the report.
The report states that the official tally of mail-in ballots counted from the Big Island during the 2024 general election was 76,595, while county records on the island only report collecting 57,553 ballot envelopes, a discrepancy of nearly 20,000 in an election where, for example, Mayor Kimo Alameda defeated incumbent Mitch Roth by less than 10,000 votes.
Commissioner Ralph Cushnie, who co-authored the report, told Aloha State Daily that Big Island elections officials said the discrepancy was the fault of the U.S. Postal Service, which transports the ballots from the Big Island to O‘ahu.
“They said that the post office didn’t always provide the receipts,” Cushnie said. “So, you’d think that the next thing they would have done would be to reach out to the post office to see if they had the receipts, but they never did.”
However, a September report by a different group of commissioners rejects Cushnie’s conclusion, claiming that the Big Island does not, in fact, rely on USPS receipts to reconcile ballot counts.
That September report concluded that claims of a voting discrepancy on Hawai‘i Island have no apparent basis and “unnecessarily feed mistrust in voting.”
But the August report also found discrepancies between the county election data from Kaua‘i and the state-certified election results. On Kaua‘i, the county reported 26,633 mail ballot envelopes, less than the 27,075 reported by the state.
Cushnie said that one might expect the state certified count of ballots to be less than the number of envelopes counted in the counties — after all, some ballots are bound to be invalid for one reason or another and wouldn’t be included in the final count.
“But there shouldn’t be any way for more ballots to be added,” Cushnie asserted.
The report touches on other problems. Both Maui and O‘ahu provided no records regarding the transfer of ballots from the counties to the state counting center, but Scott Nago, Hawai‘i's Chief Election Officer, only confirmed this to the commission in March, months after certifying the election results.
The August report concludes with a series of recommendations: an external audit of all ballot envelopes, mail-in ballots and USPS receipts for each county; returning to in-person voting only to eliminate the heavy reliance on USPS; and Nago’s termination.
The commission endorsed that first recommendation at its most recent meeting on Dec. 3, albeit not unanimously. Commissioner Jeffrey Osterkamp — a co-author of the September report — said the claims of 19,000 unaccounted-for ballots on the Big Island are “complete fiction.”
“We’re trying to create a circus,” Osterkamp said. “The idea is to create a big spectacle and create additional concern by the public about the voting process … We all know at some level that this whole 19,000-vote supposed discrepancy is complete fiction and we’re going to see that it continues to be repeated over and over and over without any evidence whatsoever.”
However, the commission voted 4-4 — and therefore did not pass — on a motion by Cushnie to formally request a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into possible mail fraud in the 2024 election.
“When the entire election relies on the mail, the integrity of mail tracking becomes the foundation of the system,” Cushnie told the commission. “Inconsistent or missing USPS records, unexplained increases in envelope counts, the absence of required chain of custody logs … these gaps are not minor.”
The commission did not discuss Cushnie’s motion further.
Cushnie told ASD the commission will continue to discuss the state audit issue at its next meeting in January.
For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up here for our free Daily Edition newsletter.
