Hawai‘i voters gave Democratic Gov. Josh Green a clear win with over 70% of the vote. At the same voters in Honolulu — where more than 65% of Hawai‘i's registered voters live — rejected ranked choice voting by almost 25,000 votes. Nearly 128,000 people voted no, with more than half opposing the change.
The Republican candidate for governor got fewer than 70,000 votes in Hawai‘i. Nearly 58,000 more people voted down ranked choice voting than voted for him. I can’t tell you how any one person marked both lines. I can tell you this was not a Republican corner of the city talking to itself.
Question 5 would have changed how Honolulu picks its mayor, its nine City Council members, and its prosecuting attorney for the City and County of Honolulu. The switch could not start before 2032. Voters had plenty of time before the change would take effect, and they still didn’t want it.
Honolulu’s current system takes a little explaining. A candidate who wins a majority in August wins outright. If nobody does, the top two advance to November. If only two candidates are running, the race goes straight to November.
Question 5 would have replaced it. Most contested races would be settled in November, with voters ranking up to five candidates. Bigger fields would be cut down in August first. If nobody has a majority, the last-place candidate is eliminated, those votes move to the next ranked candidate still in the race, and the process repeats until someone has a majority of the remaining ballots. (Editor's note: ASD provided a two-part deep dive into the pros and cons of ranked choice voting in advance of the election, here and here.)
Supporters argued that deciding more races in November would draw more voters than an August election. There’s no question August elections draw fewer voters. But the University of Hawai‘i’s own research does not show that ranked choice voting, by itself, increases turnout. Honolulu already has a way to get a majority winner: hold the runoff.
The part that gets left out of the brochure: if you don’t rank every candidate, your ballot can die in the middle. Once every name you marked is eliminated, your ballot is finished. Nobody stole it. It just stops counting. It’s called “ballot exhaustion,” but what it really is is real-life disenfranchisement.
The winner can then have a majority of the ballots still being counted and still not have a majority of the people who voted for that office. Call it a majority if you like. It is not the one most people mean by the word.
Hawai‘i already uses ranked choice voting in some special elections. But Question 5 would have taken it much further, making ranked choice voting part of the regular process for electing Honolulu’s city officers. Honolulu said no.
They were not voting no for sport. Other charter amendments passed. The one that rewires the election did not.
You can like Josh Green and dislike this. You can wish more people showed up in August and still refuse an election system where some ballots stop counting before the count is over. Honolulu did both.
Congratulations, Honolulu.
Ken Cuccinelli is chairman of Heritage Action’s Election Transparency Initiative and a former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security and attorney general of Virginia.
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