Were the results of the 2024 Hawai‘i County election invalid? We may finally have an answer … next year.
For more than a year, the Hawai‘i Elections Commission has been wracked with debate over alleged mismanagement of the 2024 election results, particularly on Hawai‘i Island. But after multiple conflicting reports, countless failed motions and hours upon hours of argument, the Commission seems no closer to resolving the issue.
At the Commission’s latest meeting on Wednesday, commissioners disputed the issue yet again for more than five hours. At the center of the discussion were the findings of a permitted interaction group formed in October that investigated each county’s “chain-of-custody” practices: that is, what happens to the ballots when they are submitted, how they are counted and who does so.
The group’s findings were, on their face, damning. The report claimed that the group was unable to obtain documentation proving that all counties maintained daily records of their chain-of-custody, and therefore no independent body can verify whether any county has made an accurate accounting of their ballots.
If true, this would dovetail with previous permitted interaction group reports alleging a 19,042-ballot discrepancy in Hawai‘i County’s ballot totals. The state Office of Elections reported 76,595 mail-in ballots were received in that county’s election, but Commissioner Ralph Cushnie has alleged that the county’s mail-in ballot dropbox records and USPS receipts indicate only 57,553 ballots were received.
Hawai‘i County Mayor Kimo Alameda won election in 2024 by less than 9,000 votes.
Consequently, Cushnie and other commissioners have called for audits of the election results to confirm their validity — and on Wednesday, Cushnie moved to have the U.S. Department of Justice investigate the case, but was voted down — but other commissioners remain skeptical of the entire issue. Commissioner Jeffrey Osterkamp accused Cushnie on Wednesday of “lying to the commission and to the people in the audience again and again and again.”
Osterkamp had been a member of another permitted interaction group that, in September, published its own report rejecting claims of electoral wrongdoing.
“This is a one-man crusade by Commissioner Cushnie to try to show that a discrepancy exists that does not exist,” Osterkamp said. “We all know that, we know the emperor has no clothes, but we’re pretending that this is a real issue.”
But Osterkamp was wrong on one point: by Wednesday, the matter was no longer a one-man crusade, as dozens of testifiers urged the Commission to remove state Elections Officer Scott Nago from his position. Others accused commissioners directly of interfering with the 2024 election through incompetence or maliciousness.
Nago told Aloha State Daily that the 19,000-ballot discrepancy signifies little. He said Cushnie’s count of the county’s reported ballots relies upon USPS Business Reply Mail receipts, which are not official election records.
Indeed, the Office of Elections has responded to the commission’s chain-of-custody complaints already. Last September, the Office of Elections issued a report finding that allegations of election mismanagement were unfounded and lacked rigor.
Nonetheless, Nago told ASD he is still willing to investigate the 2024 election. For the time being, he said, the Office of Elections is required by federal law to maintain all election records for 22 months after an election. Once that period expires — around the end of September — the Office of Elections can dig into the ballots.
While several commissioners and other testifiers scoffed at the idea that the Office of Elections cannot investigate the contents of records it is required to hold, Nago told ASD that the federal law is for the benefit of federal investigators, who reserve the right to review unadulterated records within that 22-month period.
Nago added that the State Supreme Court could also order the records to be unsealed for review. However, a complaint Cushnie filed against Nago and the Office of Elections in the Supreme Court in 2024 came to nothing.
But Nago also told the Commission that, by the time the 22-month period ends, the state will be gearing up for the 2026 general election, meaning the Office of Elections will have its hands full and any investigation into the 2024 election will, realistically, not bear fruit until 2027.
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