Someone get Chad Blair a paper bag, because the poor man is hyperventilating.
In a lengthy screed published Sunday, Blair, Civil Beat politics editor asks, “Are Hawaiʻi’s Elections Safe From Donald Trump?”
Oh no! The Orange Menace! Everybody panic! Now ... what’s the danger?
The article starts misinforming readers in the subhed, before Blair really gets rolling:
“The president and his minions are doing everything they can to limit voting nationally.”
Yes. Limited to citizens. You know, like real countries do. Any other implication is shameless fearmongering.
The subhed continues: “So far, they are failing ‘bigly.’”
Did you see that? They turned Trump’s catchword against him! Hah-hah! Take that, Orange Man! You just got served!
“Failing” is a dishonest way of saying “being viciously opposed by Democrats, who, for some reason, seem absolutely rabid about getting rid of any safeguard against non-citizen voting."
Blair, in lockstep with Democrats and Democrat-friendly media, tried to depict Trump’s speech as nothing more than a rerun of his complaint that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from him.
To believe that, you’d have to ignore the entirety of the speech or the evidence posted to the White House.
(Sidenote: U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda’s office emailed me a press statement denouncing the speech in exactly the same tone as Blair. I replied with one question: “Has the representative read the evidence posted by the White House?” No reply. No reply at all.)
The speech and the evidence include problems dating back years before 2020 and years since. They included revelations about intelligence officials and federal law enforcement withholding information and evidence from a duly elected sitting president out of sheer political partisanship. They included the revelation that a quarter million foreigners are registered to vote — not back in 2020, but right now. They included revelations that China has hacked and stolen the voter records of 220 million Americans.
If you’re content to believe, as Blair would have you believe, the speech was nothing but a 2020 complaint, you owe to yourself to look at the documents.
Blair fearmongers for about Trump’s efforts, about the purported dangers of the SAVE Act currently before Congress, so much so that a point-by-point rebuttal would be tedious for me to write, miserable for you to read, so let me make one simple, factual historical point:
Everything Trump is aiming for, everything the SAVE Act is aiming for, was literally and without controversy Hawai‘i’s routine election law from 1970 to 2019.
Anyone but me remember that? Blair certainly seems to have forgotten. At 58, most of my entire life here in the Islands included elections held in person as the default, and everyone had to show ID.
No one had a problem with this.
In case you’ve forgotten, that voter-ID regime was set up in 1970, via Act 26 of the Hawai‘i state Legislature under Gov. John A. Burns, when Hawai‘i was just as much a blue state as it is now. It was set up by Democrats following national trends toward good government reforms, modernizing and overhauling our elections for greater trust.
Hawai‘i threw that all away in 2019, ostensibly on the grounds that moving to an all-mail election would improve Hawai‘i’s lousy turnout.
It didn’t do that. As I pointed out on this subject last year, Hawai‘i’s 2024 turnout of 60% in the general election was the lowest in our entire history of statehood.
Too bad the bill didn’t include language that says, “If mail-in elections fail at this goal, we revert to the normal procedure.” So we seem stuck with this shabby substitute for a real election until some future Legislature gets that old time good-government religion again.
There are so many problems with all-mail voting that it’s a shame an experienced pundit like Blair can’t step out of his Trump Derangement System long enough to use the Civil Beat platform for good.
To cite just one example: The Post Office itself.
Reminder, from 2022, right here in the Islands: “Many mailed ballots in Hawaii’s primary election weren’t tallied due to missed deadline,” wrote the Star-Advertiser, adding, “More than 3,000 Hawai‘i voters suffered a pitfall — voting too late — in this year’s primary election. County election officials report that 3,125 ballots cast by mail in the Aug. 13 contest didn’t count because they weren’t received in time.”
According to the Hawai‘i State Office of Elections, your 2026 mail-in ballot must be received by 7 p.m. on Aug. 8, the day of the Primary Election and by 7 pm. November 3, for the General.
Pop quiz: What’s the last day you can put your ballot in the mail; and be confident it will arrive in time?
You don’t know, do you? No one does. No one can. Hawai‘i's lawmakers took one look at our formerly solid and concrete elections in 2019 and said, "You know what this system needs? An element of uncertainty!"
And that’s before you get to the fact that postal workers are in a union and that union endorses candidates. It’s a body of people who, at least when it comes to presidential elections, openly announces it has taken a side. This should have disqualified the Post Office from being our default ballot handler. Well, except that oddly enough, that union endorses the same Democrats who totally want the ballots to arrive by mail.
(Thought experiment: In an alternate reality, postal workers are fervent Republicans, and the Democrat response to the idea of all-mail elections is … what? Can anyone guess? What would Alternate Reality Chad Blair have to say about the safety and security of handing all our ballots to "Trump's minions?")
I don’t have to prove this openly declared partisanship has resulted in rigged elections. It’s enough to say that it plainly could, and our election laws must be based on minimizing risks, not ripping out the seatbelts, turning off the air bags while declaring, “Meh, I’m sure everything will be fine.”
Every code of professional ethics bans not just impropriety, but the mere appearance of impropriety. And, friends, this appears, does it not?
Blair and other likeminded voices are working overtime to tell us Trump is undermining people’s confidence in elections. No. The Hawai‘i state Legislature did that for me all on its own when it replaced real elections with a direct-mail marketing survey in 2019. And you don't even get a sticker for voting anymore! What's the fun in that?
None of these people are addressing the critical issue here, bigger than even the voter ID issue, though they are related. As I’ve written before, the defining element of an election you can trust is the not the ballot so much as ballot booth. The booth is where “one person, one vote” happens. The booth is where you can vote your individual conscience, not matter what kind of pressure might be coming at you to vote one way or another.
Hawai‘i threw away the booth as the normal, default setting for voting. We’ve been faking elections ever since. We get “comfort,” in the words of the Office of Elections, instead of confidence; “convenience,” in the words of Legislature, instead of security.
Those are fine descriptors … for an airport business hotel. They have no business being the defining qualities of an election.
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
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A. Kam Napier can be reached at kam@alohastatedaily.com.
