Years of shortchanging elections led to Honolulu’s long voter lines

In May 2021, City Clerk Glen Takahashi stood before the Honolulu City Council in a hearing to explain why he should keep his job.

One of the city clerk’s jobs is to oversee elections on Oahu, and this hearing came just seven months after the 2020 general election where voters waited for hours to cast their ballots, the result of long lines at voting sites in Honolulu and Kapolei.

“There is a saying,” Takahashi told the council, “that you cannot measure what you cannot or have not measured.”

That election in 2020, Hawaii’s first go-round with mail voting, allowed officials to take stock of the types of services voters need and the “demands that will be placed upon us,” Takahashi said.

Four years later, Oahu saw a virtual repeat of what happened in 2020. Long lines. Delayed results. And tired voters.

The preparations county elections officials took to alleviate the long lines – like enhanced media campaigns and additional voting booths – did little to stem the flood of 8,000 voters that descended on the only two polling sites on Oahu on Tuesday.

The clerk’s office did not ask for a major increase in resources or funding ahead of the 2024 election, a Civil Beat review of publicly available budget materials and interviews with council members shows.

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Most notably, there was no push to add additional voter centers.

Although Takahashi had said the city opened only two voting centers on Election Day due to a lack of resources, he told Civil Beat on Thursday: “We’re amply funded.”

But experts on voting systems similar to Hawaii’s, voting rights advocates and a growing chorus of lawmakers say Oahu needs to have more than two voting centers open on the day of an election.

“I don’t like giving advice to other states, but just on the surface, having two locations on an island with a million people on it might be something they want to reconsider,” said Phil Keisling, a former secretary of state for Oregon who oversaw the state’s switch to mail balloting.

Other mail-voting states require county elections officials to scale the number of voting centers according to the population of each county.

In the last three years, both Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate have put forward proposals to increase the number of voting centers depending on the population of each island.

All of the proposals died without ever getting a hearing.

Other mail-voting states have one voter center for every 30,000 to 70,000 active voters, according to an analysis from the National Vote at Home Institute, a group that offers policy recommendations on elections.

Based on Tuesday’s turnout, a similar ratio would require Oahu to have somewhere between four to 10 centers open on Election Day.

Denver, which has a population of just under 2.7 million with 471,000 active voters – has 30 voter centers, one for every 15,000 voters.

Oahu, with a population close to a million and voter turnout over 320,000, has just two.

Keisling holds up Colorado as a gold standard for providing voting options. He said Oregon, which requires just one voter center per county, occasionally sees long lines on Election Day. But even he says it’s nothing like what happened on Oahu on Tuesday.

“Anyone standing in line for more than an hour, that’s a problem,” he said. “That’s just too long, even if the weather’s nice.”

A federal panel on voting recommended in 2014 that people should not have to wait more than half an hour in line to vote.

Giving voters multiple options on how they want to vote is integral in systems like Hawaii’s, experts said.

“You’ve got to have that voter centric piece in mind,” said Ben Hovland, chairman of the federal Elections Assistance Commission.

Limited Resources

Budget presentations since 2021 show small funding increases in the last four years that the clerk’s office and council focused on collective bargaining raises for staff and new, expanded media campaigns urging people not to wait until Election Day to register and vote.

The Honolulu Elections Division’s budget has hovered just around $2.5 million in each presidential election year. That went up to $4.5 million this year, but Takahashi attributes that to a difference in accounting for funds rather than an actual increase. The elections budget since 2012 has stayed relatively flat, records show.

Voter service centers need staff and space to operate effectively. Too few staff and too few voter booths mean slower throughput, which means longer lines.

To prepare, officials set up about 20 more Election Day voting booths at Honolulu Hale, bringing the number up from about 30 booths in 2020 to 50 this year. Takahashi said Kapolei Hale doesn’t have enough space to accommodate more than 30 booths.

The city also had opened pop-up voter centers in Wahiawa and Kaneohe leading up to the election, but those both were closed before Election Day.

In March, Takahashi told the council that the office aimed to hire about 70 temporary workers at $17 an hour. Staff levels on Election Day were at about 80%. It wasn’t clear how many elections workers Honolulu had in 2020 and 2022.

“You go to war with the army you have, not the one you would want or wish to have in the future,” Takahashi said in an interview, referencing a quote from the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

In previous years the city recruited volunteers to staff voting precincts, Takahashi said, but this year used a temp agency to find workers. He said the city would struggle to staff additional centers on Election Day with current staff levels. It’s not clear how many people are needed.

Takahashi said it’s not as simple as just reopening polling centers from previous years. The centers now need to have multiple versions of ballots depending on where a voter lives. And workers received enhanced training to handle same-day registration.

This year, Takahashi said, the city knew to expect long lines. The question was how long those long lines would be, and when they would surge.

“You don’t know if you’re going to be surprised at 9 in the morning or at 6 p.m. that evening. So that’s the known unknowns, as they say,” he said.

Lacking the capacity of larger spaces like Honolulu Hale and Kapolei Hale, the voter service center at Kaneohe District Park, which the county maintained for the two weeks before Election Day, would have been overwhelmed by Election Day crowds, Takahashi said.

“We have 12 voting booths in there. That’s it. That’s the limitation. So you can imagine, if something like that gets hit the way our service centers experienced on the last day, that’s a guaranteed fail,” he said.

‘We’ve Got To Be Realistic’

City elections officials can ask the council for more resources each March during the normal budgeting process. But even after experiencing long lines on Election Day in 2020 and in 2022, Takahashi’s office didn’t ask for enough resources to resolve long wait times, investing instead in early in-person voting and mail-in ballots.

This year, Takahashi told the council that he wanted to spend money on a new media campaign to encourage people to vote early.

“You don’t have to wait until the last day to actually vote. In fact, the vote-by-mail system is very secure and we recommend you doing that,” Takahashi said at the time.

Council members didn’t argue with that approach, though some said the long lines on Election Day have concerned them since 2020.

After that election, council member Radiant Cordero said, she almost raised the issue through a formal resolution but ended up not doing so. That’s because she wanted to give people more time to become familiar with mail-in voting before investing money into new voter service centers, she said.

Now, as the council’s budget chair, she said she’s open to giving elections officials money for more service centers if Takahashi’s office asks for it.

Council member Andria Tupola, whose district includes Kapolei Hale, also said more voter service centers should be open on Election Day. She wants to hold an accountability hearing to discuss the long lines.

“We’ve got to be realistic. Kapolei Hale is never going to be sufficient. And Honolulu Hale, as the second location – and just two – is never sufficient,” she said, adding that the clerk’s office hasn’t asked for resources to open more locations.

Some voters waiting in line on Election Day said they didn’t vote early because they worried about ballot security. Nick Omoso had been waiting at Honolulu Hale for about two-and-a-half hours before finally reaching the door to get inside.

He decided to vote in person on Election Day because it made him feel more assured that the vote would be counted appropriately, referring to conservatives’ claims of voter fraud after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

“I just don’t feel that it was an honest election, to me,” Omoso said. “As much as other people seem to think that way, there are a lot of people that think something happened there.”

Colin Moore, a political science professor at the University of Hawaii, said in an email that people who choose to wait in line for that long – for whatever reason – likely will continue to do so. And while the vast majority of Hawaii’s voters vote by mail, a slightly higher proportion of people voted in person this year than in the past two election cycles.

“Instead of browbeating these voters into using mail-in ballots, county clerks should focus on accommodating their choice to vote on Election Day. If we’re serious about encouraging participation, we need to adjust our approach to meet voters where they are,” Moore said.

Cordero said in addition to providing enough locations for people to vote in person on Election Day, part of the challenge is tackling this perception that the other methods aren’t secure.

“We also have to get to the root of it,” she said.

Adding More Voting Centers

Two years ago, Common Cause Hawaii recommended 15 additional voting centers.

On Oahu, they would be located in Waianae, Nanakuli, Ewa Beach, Pearl City, Laie and Waimanalo. On Maui, in Lahaina, Kihei and Makawao.

On Kauai, the organization called for a voter service center in Poipu and another in Anahola. And on the Big Island, Common Cause wanted to see centers in Pahoa, Waimea, Volcano and Honokaa.

Those locations were meant to cover areas that the current voter centers on each island didn’t reach and were based on a tool developed by researchers at the University of Southern California.

It takes into account factors like population density, distance required to drive to existing voting centers, the number of youth voters, the percent of voters who cast ballots in person, voters of color and those from underrepresented communities, and areas where voters may have limited English proficiency.

Mindy Romero, executive director for University of Southern California’s Center for Inclusive Democracy, said researchers encourage state and county officials to use that tool.

She said the center reached out to elections officials in Hawaii in 2022 but have had little contact with them since.

Sandy Ma, a former Common Cause director who is now vice president of the League of Women Voters of Honolulu, questioned why officials closed pop-up voter centers in Wahiawa and Kaneohe before Election Day.

She said volunteers at those locations found people showing up to vote Tuesday.

“They were confused,” Ma said. “They were like ‘We thought we could be here and vote in person.’”

“There’s an appetite for in-person voting on Election Day,” she noted. “This is the second presidential election in a row. How many more times do we need to go through this?”

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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.