 Aloha, and welcome to this bi-weekly show, The State of the State of Hawaii. Yeah, I'm your host, Stephanie Stoll-Dalton. And today our topic is about Hawaii's midterm election results. So we are interested to address what did the midterm vote do and tell us about Hawaii now? What do voters say to us in the voting outcomes that we have? So to talk about some of these questions and others, we have an expert guest. And that person is Dr. Colin Moore from the University of Hawaii at Minoa, the director of the policy center. And he is here to help us understand what we have to understand now about the outcomes. So we know that we have the new executive leadership team in place, and we have the rest, and we have also the other roles of government newly fulfilled. And also we have some other aspects of the election to discuss like the turnout. And I think that's one of the first questions I'd like to bring up with our guest, Dr. Colin Moore, is our voter turnout this year for this election plummeted from earlier elections. And at about the time of the voting, the rate of voters was 41%. I think now they're coming up with a number like 48% voting percentage. But it's still less than 50% of the voters who were sent all of the ballots that Hawaii sends out to make voting easy. So the state has gone to some effort to make voting a little easier, but now we have this very, very low voting turnout rate. So Colin, could you talk to us a little bit about that and what it means? Sure, sure. Thanks for having me on, Stephanie. Right, so turnout was low. And I think a lot of people have described this as one of the quietest general election seasons here in Hawaii that they can remember. I mean, there was a lot of activity on the mainland, a lot of money spent, but here, very little. There are very few signs. There was relatively little spending from the campaigns. And I think there were people who forgot that there really was much of a midterm here, in part because the top of the ticket races, governor, senator, US House, a lot of those people reasonably thought were more or less locked up already. That green shots, Takuta case, we're going to win very easily. So you mentioned voter turnout, and I want to unpack this a little bit because this is a more complicated question than people I think fully appreciate. So the final voter turnout we got in 2022 was about 48%, which meant that of the registered voters, 48% of those turned out to vote. But I want to be a little careful when I describe this. So overall, nationwide turnout, there's a few ways that this is measured. And sometimes it's measured in a different way called the voting eligible population, which means that the total number of people who basically are US citizens over 18, how many of those turned out to vote? That number nationwide is somewhere around 46%, and Hawaii actually is more like 40%. So there are states that have lower voter turnouts than us in the last election, places like West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi. So we're not the worst. So that might be one piece of good news. The second thing I'd say is that for the way we measure voter turnout ourselves, we have to be a little bit careful because the number of registered voters over the last few years, particularly since we've moved to automatic voter registration has gone through the roof. And when that happens, it means that, we could have the same number of people voting or even a little more, but as a percentage of total turnout, it's gonna look like it goes down. So we actually had more people vote in 2022 than 2018, although the voter turnout didn't really look any better. The last thing I'd say about this, which is my last point of caution about voter turnout here, is that there were only about 726,000 ballots that were mailed out. The number of registered voters is way higher than that. So if you look at just the number, the percentage of people who returned to ballot or participated as a percentage of the number of votes that were mailed out, we're looking at more like 57% participation. So it looks a little bit better. Our election office is very careful about purging registered voters. You have to receive and notice a couple of times, but there's quite a number of people who end up in this sort of purgatory where they're not mailed a ballot, but they're still kept on the list of registered voters. And it takes a while for them to get taken off the list. So that's a long way of saying, I don't think people should be freaking out about our voter turnout rate. It's not great, but it's not perhaps as terrible as it sometimes appears. Well, that is interesting. So can you make that clear now about the group that's in purgatory? Who's in that overlap or underlap? So they're likely people who... So there are people where the elections office can't confirm that they still live where they are, where they say they are, because they haven't participated in an election. They haven't responded to one of their notices trying to confirm that they still are registered at that address. So they're not removed from the list of registered voters, but they are no longer mailed a ballot. And it's quite a number of people who are in that category. Hawaii sometimes has a pretty transient population or people move to a different location and don't re-register. I wanna be clear, this has nothing to do with voter fraud. We're not talking about people who are, perhaps registered or shouldn't be registered or participating in a way as they shouldn't be participating. This is just because the elections office is very careful that they only mailed ballots to people who they're sure live at those addresses because they've participated in past elections or they've responded to one of these inquiries. But they're also very careful not to remove people from the list of registered voters. And so there's a group who are still registered voters who don't get a ballot. This is just a really, this is a complex process, but this is a way of explaining why we have so many registered voters, but we only mail out, we mail out many fewer ballots than the number of registered voters actually reflect. Well, that's very interesting. And I found that I was in a pinch because I was not here for a while before the election and I had my mail also forwarded to that other place. Now, so I was not expecting to get my ballot in my forwarded mail. So because I had read that it was against the law or that Hawaii did not forward ballots. So I never expected to receive a ballot. And then when I, at the very end, before I left to come back, then I went and picked up my mail and I had a ballot. There was my ballot. And, but there wasn't enough time to fill it out and mail it back, right? So I was in that situation. So fortunately, I was able to, I was coming back in time to be able to go to Honolulu, Holly and vote there in line and took my ballot with me and said that I had it. Other people seem to have other situations too where they were bringing their ballots, but nobody seemed to care that about the question of why did it get sent to me when I understood it wasn't what Hawaii did that we don't forward these out of state. So nobody really wanted to take me up on that. And I said, well, I wasn't, I was just curious to know because it did set me up with a situation of possibly missing the chance to vote. So I also, so I also found out and I don't know how rare that situation is and I don't know if I'm correct about Hawaii doesn't mail out ballots out of state, but then how would they do that? Because actually one person who did respond to me said that it was the federal mail processing that caused the ballot to be moved out of state, to be mailed out of state, didn't have to do with Hawaii. So maybe they don't have a way to intervene on the ballot forwarding. Although it's in an orange envelope and it should be identifiable. And if it isn't in the law, it ought to be precluded from going out. And is this an issue or not an issue for anybody? I think in this particular issue, you're talking about something that affects a very small number of people. I mean, people who would have had a mail forwarding service at the time the ballots were mailed out. And I doubt the U.S. Postal Service knows what to remove from that pile and what not to. And I mean, that would probably be a good question for the elections office. My guess is they don't mail ballots out of state. In other words, they don't. If you couldn't register and have your official address not be in Hawaii. But maybe, yeah. I mean, you ask an interesting question. I would assume you can still get an out of state ballot if you register for it that way that would be mailed out of state. Yeah, I'm not sure. But I don't think it's something to be too worried about because I think there are very, very few people in that situation. Yeah. So, okay, I'm gonna not worry about it at all unless I come across some information that says that it's the law to not send the matter state. And then I might be interested to look into it a little bit more. But anyway, it was a little bit disconcerting. And then when I came back and found out that the voter turnout was so low, that's when it rose to a little higher level for me because I thought how many are caught up in this. But anyway, we're already so overwhelmed with the fraudulent cries and this sort of thing that this is certainly explainable by having the confusion over how do they get a mail forwarded ballot out of the mail forwarded of the US post office and get that under control as a whole nother story. So we don't wanna stay on that topic much longer. But I think you're saying that races, some of the comments that I've read about the low turnout is that the races so many times are already decided in the primary in the state that the incentive to vote has been low and that that's a factor of it. Do you agree with that? I do. I mean, there's a couple of things going on there. So you're right that there's very little competition sometimes in our general election. And to the extent there is, it's often with nonpartisan races like the mayor's race. And we saw that a little bit in Maui where they had a competitive mayor's race. And that excitement leads people to vote, but it also means there's likely to be a lot more spending and communication around the election. I mean, those election advertisements, ads, those get people, those informed people that there's an election going on and get them interested in it. And we didn't really have any of that. So there's no other than public service announcements. There's not that level of communication that's going on in a really competitive election that's obviously funded by the campaigns themselves. So I do think that's primarily the reason. If you look at Hawaii's turnout for primary elections, we actually have pretty relatively high turnout for primary elections compared to a lot of states because that's where the action is. That's where all the competition is. That's where the communication is. But when we move to general elections, that's where our turnout really suffers. And partly it's rational. People don't really feel like their vote matters much because most of these races aren't all that competitive. I will say that there were some unexpected results this time. The Republican Party in Hawaii, which often struggles, had a little bit better of an outcome. It was a pretty good year by Hawaii standards for Republicans. They managed to pick up two seats in the house. They picked up one in the Senate. And that was due to, I think, turn out an excitement around those really local races, mainly in Central and West Oahu. Well, that's true. I wanted to ask you about the Republican activity, which did seem to have a larger presence in this election. And do you think that that vote was constrained to more local elections because of the national issues were unappealing to Hawaii's voters? I mean, do we have people here that don't tend to the national? I think that for Republicans here, they tend to do best when they are talking about very local issues. And often you will see Republicans, I think successful Republicans, try not to get bogged down by a bunch of national level ideological issues. You even saw that with the Duke Iona's campaign. I mean, I don't think you ran a very successful campaign, but he basically tried to sidestep questions about abortion, about Trump, about other issues. And to say those are more or less, it's either irrelevant or those are settled issues in Hawaii law. And that was an approach used by some of the other Republican candidates. They're most successful when they do try to set themselves up as an alternative to the Hawaii Democratic Party. In fact, I think a lot of Republicans or at least some that I've seen have success. People like Kurt Fevella, the Senator from Emma Beach, now one of two Republican senators really tend to engage in local issues, kind of anti-corruption issues, issues of transparency, places where Republicans have been really strong and not try to become representatives of the more Trump mega brand from the mainland that isn't too successful out here. I mean, people don't love the Hawaii Democratic Party, but there aren't too many ideological conservatives, not a lot to win, certainly statewide elections, but even in most legislative districts. But there is a lot of frustration with the Hawaii Democratic Party. So if you can just set yourself up as an alternative, that can be pretty successful as long as you don't get dragged into these ideological debates. It's, yeah, that seems reasonable and informative, a way to describe it. It would be good to have a little more competition and varying of viewpoints expressed in the campaign, of course, if we had more presence from the Republicans, but maybe this year is the beginning of an increase in that participation, hopefully. Now, getting back to, of course, the low turnout and these other factors of our situation in Hawaii, are you a proponent of the ranked choice voting approach? Does that make a difference for the ways Hawaii is short in successful voting outcomes? Yeah, ranked choice is interesting because it's one of these things that has finally got a lot of attention after pretty much being off the radar in the United States for decades. And it's expanded a little bit. They now have ranked choice systems in Maine and most famously now in Alaska. So would something like that be adopted here? I mean, I think the short answer to that question is no, because mostly this has come through an initiative and proposition system directly from voters. We don't have that in Hawaii. And so I think it's very unlikely that the state legislature would move to a system like that because for the most part elected representatives don't like to do anything that upsets the system under which they were elected. Now, would ranked choice help? So there's a few ways you can think about this. So the way ranked choice is done in Alaska where you rank, like the name suggests one, two, three, and then if your first choice comes in for in this case, third, then those votes are redistributed. So you're never wasting votes. Some people say that this creates more moderate candidates. It certainly would create more competitive elections. I think ranked choice is a fine system. I think that multi-member districts are another way to get at that, which we used to have in Hawaii, which seems to lead to more competition, certainly diversity in the candidates you get. Another way to do that is to move to a California-style top two system where no matter what the party is, the top two vote-getters advance to the next round. So in Hawaii, it would often be two Democrats advancing to the next round, but voters would still get another look at those candidates in the general election. I think all of those systems are fine. I don't think any of them would really solve the central problem here, which is more competition. What I would like to see is a more robust system of public financing here, and there's a lot of good options to choose from. If I had to pick, I'd rather have better public financing versus ranked choice or something like that. The last problem with ranked choice that I'll mention is a lot of voters just find it very confusing. And that's never good because voters already find parts of the electoral system confusing and intimidating, and ranked choice might just add another level of unnecessary complexity. I think you've got a good point there, but there could put some effort into getting that information out would help a lot. Well, okay, on the public financing of a change to one of these other ways to vote, where would that public financing come from? Are you expecting that to be something that taxpayers would be willing to back or would that be something a candidate, the candidates or the executives, the government, the governor, would he do anything like that? Where would that come, how would that get moving? Good question. So Hawaii actually was an early leader in public financing. We've had a system of public financing since 1978 and that money comes from a check off on your income tax returns, which fewer and fewer people are opting in, but it is enough that there is a fund available, a public finance fund. It doesn't offer a whole lot of money and fewer and fewer candidates have been taking advantage of it. I think in this last election cycle, Kaike Helle famously said he was going to use public financing to run his campaign and then he didn't file and required after David and became ineligible for that financing, but our system doesn't provide enough money to make it worthwhile for most candidates to opt in because to get that money, you have to agree to an expenditure limit and the limits too low, the money isn't enough, but there are better ways to do it. And there's really three ways, three places I think are doing it better than us. The first way is what they now do in Maine and Arizona, which is just full public financing. If you can show that you have enough voter support, then the state will provide a grant. That is, they decide how much there's a formula that determines how much money that is, but it's pretty generous. In New York City, there's what they call a super match program. So if you, for example, raise $100, the city will match that donation up to $800. And then the last way is what they have in Seattle, which I think is the most innovative system, where they actually send vouchers to voters. So every voter gets four $25 vouchers and then they can distribute those vouchers to the candidates of their choice, but the money comes from a public fund, not from voters. So it democratizes campaign finance. So where does the government get this money? Well, in Hawaii, it gets it from income taxes. In Seattle, it gets it from a levy on property taxes. The truth is mainly that we're not talking about a whole lot of money here. We're talking about, well, it depends on how many people opt in, but a few million dollars usually is what would do it. So my position always has been that for tax dollars, this is a relatively small amount of money that could really increase political competition. And I think it better quality candidates because a lot of people who would be good candidates, one of the reasons they don't wanna run is because they don't wanna have to raise a bunch of money. That is a huge impediment to the whole operation. So what about the people who are the non-winners of, for instance, with the governor? We have many nice candidates, many appealing candidates for governor. And I think that I was getting confused for a while because that 41% or 48% or less of 50% coming in and voting doesn't represent a big lunge of support for that candidate that was selected out of the competition that we do after in the campaign. So it seems like for those who don't win, who don't get traction early and have that income to do the campaign, it sets up kind of an unfair situation. I don't know, does there anything to that that makes sense to you? Yeah, I mean, look, we know in Hawaii who are voters and who are not voters. I mean, voters tend to be older, wealthier, better educated. We know that people in East Oahu vote at much higher rates than people in West Oahu or South Maui. And so the electorate looks different than the population at large. And they care about different issues. So I always tell people like my students because young people don't vote either. If you want candidates to care about your issues, then as a group, you need to start voting more. I mean, why do older people get so much attention? Why do public sector workers get so much attention? Because they're reliable voters. And so you do, it is skewed. And as a result of that, the issues that policymakers care about is skewed as well. Well, that's a very good point. And I understand that there were some young people, groups that did play in this past election. Didn't, are they calling them the, is it the Gen Xers that some did show up? I mean, which group are the gun control youngsters and the ones that have gone through these high school and grade school gun shooting incidents? Do you happen to know about their success in this last election or their presence? So I think that there are some really motivated young people who've turned out and they've been really good at drawing attention to some of those issues. Certainly gun control has been one that the young millennials, Gen Z folks, but they're not turning out en masse in a group. And we'd like to see a lot more of that. That's the way you can gain political power. And it's particularly true here in Hawaii where we have real fall off from older voters to younger voters. We tend to have some of the lowest rates of young voter turnout in the state here. And I don't think we've seen the kind of mobilization among some groups that you've seen on the mainland for young voters. So maybe there's some education that has to happen here too. Hasn't civics completely fallen out of the curriculum? Are we doing any of that in our school? We are doing some. I mean, I've been involved in some of this at the state level, but we don't have a lot of emphasis on civics. There's only one semester of required civics in high school. And there hasn't been a lot of support for that at the Department of Education. I mean, the folks I know who work in social studies are terrific and work very hard to try to encourage civic education, but they don't get the kind of resources they need and there needs to be more curricular support for that. I think that's true across the nation, but it's also true here. And I think that's one place we can really make an intervention. Yeah, I'm glad to hear that that one civics course just a semester course in high school is still required. But like you said, it could be replaced easily with these other emphases that we've had over the last several years. So then that leaves it to you, Colin, and your colleagues, they have to come to your department to get into these issues and to see how important it is that they know about them. Well, when you have gone out and done things in the school, what have you done and what's happened as a result of that? You've been invited by individual schools or did the Education Department ask you to say something? We, I mean, I've worked on various initiatives with the DOE and I actually helped revise the civic standards for the state that were rolled out a couple of years ago. And what we tried to do when we did these revisions just in the last few minutes we have is to make it more about active civics, to get students actively involved in trying to change policy to understand how this works on the ground level and to make civics a little bit less about reading the constitution and reading the great ideas of, you know, the old dead white men who wrote this stuff, which of course is extremely important and they had very valuable ideas that need to be understood, but we don't think that's the way into civics. The way into civics is through action. And then through that, you can understand why the structure is the way it is, you know, understand these ideas. But we were trying to make this in civics as something students could be involved in change and not just as participants. Well, that is a breakthrough. I believe to see action as your entry point because when you mentioned about the Locke and Hobbes and all of the people that influenced our founding fathers and those philosophers that were so important to having even a notion of democracy, a democratic republic. So that kind of turns that around. That's very good Colin. I'm excited about that. Me too. So you're gonna keep on with that. We need to hear maybe more about that if you're gonna be involved in it because we're sorely losing here and especially I did go to one gun rally in Washington DC at which the Mr. Hogg, the young man who was in the gun shooting in Florida and very, very impressive young people who are speaking to this issue and an exciting group, large, large crowds of groups to their side of things but they don't seem to be able to dig in and make any difference at the national level to get some legislation going. But they're not finished yet, right? And they're still young and energetic but this is very, very important. So I'm glad this came up. It's really interesting to think about and I would maybe that's something to watch for. Let's see if I would get some publicity on that. What do you see coming up for the next round? The next round, everybody's gonna get elected again, right? So the next time we have an election, it'll just be everybody up for re-election but how do you see us going forward here with our voting in Hawaii? Will it stay the same or do you think we've got some incentives coming from other places that is gonna make it different? We'll have a presidential election next time. So voting always goes up during a presidential election but I don't see anything on the horizon where we're gonna see dramatic increases in voter turnout here or participation. I wish I could say something different but this stuff changes slowly. So there is no silver bullet. This is what I said when we rolled out mail-in votes that it's not gonna solve the problem immediately and it didn't but I think civic education could really help. Okay, great, yes, yes. I think that's such a good point to end on. Thank you so much, Collin. It's been a pleasure to talk to you and kind of go back over what we've just been through. It was a very special time and Hawaii did its duty and I just was informed that I said Gen X, I think when I meant to say Gen Z so I wanted to just correct that that I do know that group of people. I'm Gen X, I wish I were Gen Z but that was a long time ago. Anyway, yeah, so I'm Stephanie Stuhl-Dalton you're a host for the state of the state of Hawaii and it's been a pleasure to have Dr. Collin Moore who directs the UH Minoa policy center and we've been talking about the impact of the state's midterm election recently. So thank you for viewing and we'll look forward to seeing you again in two weeks. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.