 I'm Marcia Joyner, and we are navigating the journey and our journey from today until November. And that is about the election. And I don't know if you must be under a rock if you don't know that we are getting ready for a November the third election. And part of that is that there are Democratic Party, Republican Party, the Green Party, Aloha Party, all of these people come together in a group and work to elect their candidates. So today we're going to talk about the process of recruiting people, making sure you've got all of the things in place so that the election goes smoothly in spite of what the Orange Man in the White House says. No one has proven that there was any fraud anyplace. So anyway, we have not had any fraud in Hawaii. Most of the time we had not enough people voting, but as we saw in the primary with the mail in ballot for the first time, we had way, way more people than we've ever had since statehood. So today we're going to talk with Christopher Edwards and we're gonna talk about his job. He has just been elected to, okay, he'll tell you. And his job is to make sure that everything is in place that we recruit people, that we make sure that they understand what the process is and like so. So, Christopher, welcome. Hello. Hello. Tell us now, Christopher Edwards, tell us about Christopher and what you were elected to because I said you were elected to something better. Yeah. So I was elected by the Democratic delegates on our island Oahu to be their representative at the state standing committee for the Democratic party of the state. And so I happily work alongside my colleague, Limo Mikan to disseminate information to the party representatives for Oahu County about the goings on of the standing committee and what the party's doing on behalf of the election and the party itself so that they know and we can help organize to assist with the party and the party's functions on our island and for the candidate who are running and for the community as well as what the party's doing on other islands to assist and thinking a little bit about getting the president elected as well. A new president. Yeah, everybody, I'm sure that, you know, unless you're under some rock, everybody knows that we as Democrats and just to let the audience know I did vote for you. And... Thank you. So, but what parties do, and I have to believe this is what we do, what the Republicans do, the Green Party, all of them is to work to get our candidates elected, not just the president, but all the way down the ballot. And I wanna be sure that everybody that's listening vote all the way down the ballot. Don't just vote for president and walk away, but you'll have the ballot, it's gonna be mailed to you on October 16th. You'll have it in front of you. Walk, work all the way down. So that's mayor, also president, vice president, and the prosecutor before we get to mayor and the mayor at all of the city council people and any legions on it. Legions exactly, yeah. Yeah. So, but go all the way down. Don't leave anybody out, everyone counts. Everyone counts because it takes all of those pieces to operate together in harmony to make the city work or the island or the state or whatever we're doing. So, so tell us about Christopher. So I got started here in Hawaii about four years ago. At first I was a human resources assistant and then after that I worked in a bank and following that I worked at a private recruitment firm where I helped a lot of people find new jobs. So like all over the county was helping people find jobs in Kapolei and here in town, in between, trying to think if there was any, there were some windward jobs as well. And I had a lot of fun just getting to know people. That's kind of the big thing that I like doing is getting to know people, connecting them to other people, trying to play kind of ambassador and facilitator liaison even of like, they come to me, they say these are the things that I'm interested in. And then I try and think of, well, who else is doing work like that that can help you get to the next level of where you'd like to go? How can you learn the skills that will help you do what you'd like to do in the community next or in the workplace next? And so that's the recruiter type work that I'd like that I bring into the community service and the political service work that I do as well where my goal is to connect new people coming into the party, into the areas that they'd like to go, whether it's a caucus or a group inside the Democratic Party because we do conversate an awful lot about the different priorities that the party has when, whether it's healthcare or the economy or native Hawaiian issues, we have an agenda that's important to the community. And so I want to connect people to allow them to pursue those things and try and get those great ideas into our ears so that we can then ask legislators to perform those duties at the city or state level. Well, you mentioned, you know, working with the legislature. I noticed that, and I think I got this right, there was so many young people even with mayor. It was the two new people that won, that got the top votes. All of those people with all that we all know did not get elected. Those that have been around for a while, we get the two newbies. And then you look at other races and across the country, so many new people, young people, what are we doing to attract young people? And I mean, because you can work, well it used to be if you could work the polls but we don't have polls anymore, but it was from 16 on. So what are we doing to attract those young people to participate in government, to learn how government works? What are we doing for them? Well, I think young people are seeing other young people involved in politics and making an actual change and difference and so many times in life we really only pursue things after we've discovered that other people like us are also doing that. So whether that's other people from all the different structures and how we structure our own feelings about ourselves. So whether we see other black people doing something or we see other Asian people doing something or other young people or other rich people or other poor people, people who are coming out of middle class backgrounds and coming out of lower middle class backgrounds or even lower, if we see people succeeding and coming from a stage where we were in our lives and making a big difference in our government I think that will lead to additional people doing it. And so the steps that we've taken to engage young people are starting to really bear fruit. So allowing 16 year olds to register to vote at the age of 16 gets them excited for two years later when they can actually vote. When they see young people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being so successful as like a 31 year old in Congress and really helping to push the narratives that make her constituents happy and really push the country towards healthy situations for a lot of us, I think that will help people explore what they can do in civic engagement. And it doesn't have to be in elected politics. There's opportunities at the neighborhood board level here to get involved and to make sure that you have a better understanding of the community and then can tell the city, this is what people in my community want and what we want you to do or whether it's through civic engagement organizations of which we have a great many and people should explore them because they can be quite successful when you focus on a need like affordable housing or another need, you can really push forward and help the community. And so young people are seeing success and they want to explore that success. Plus, things have not been that great for young people in some of the big economic issues that have happened. Now we have this healthcare pandemic crisis that's really affecting our families, state by state, town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood in a really, really bad way. And then we saw the consequences of the Wall Street crisis in 070809. And we have had to deal with the consequences of the ending of the Cold War and the expansion of the global labor market in more of a free market way. And we've seen a lot of jobs leave to go to those places where pay can be lower and corporations can still succeed. And so that's why we haven't seen the job growth that we would have liked and that we saw in the decades proceeding, let's say 1990 when the Berlin Wall and all that came down, the Cold War ended. We haven't seen that growth because there's been so much growth for folks in other nations. And so we need to figure out ways like the Green New Deal that could quite successfully bring a ton of jobs back to our nation. But now two things. What are we doing for young people right here in Hawaii? And what is the party doing for them? How do you reach out to them and what is that? And then number two, explain to our audience what is the Green New Deal? Oh gosh, I don't know if you can follow up, I did describe the Green New Deal. But let's see about what we can talk about with young people. Let's talk about what we're doing, what you are doing to reach out to young people now to participate, let's say between now and November, and to participate in registering to vote, to help to get out the vote, to do all of these things. What are you doing for them, for that community? So young people here on our island need to be encouraged to vote and registered to vote. And so it's a multi-step process and we've had a lot of success bringing opportunity to them. And now we just need to make sure they actually turn in their paperwork online. They can do it on the state's website. And make sure that they actually send in their ballots or vote in person. And so what are we doing to help encourage that? There is a very interesting down ballot initiative on the county's general election ballot this year. It's charter amendment number two. And what it does is its goal is to create a Honolulu youth council or commission where those folks who sit on the commission can really advocate on behalf of youth in the city. And so what we're doing as a county committee for O'ahu and the Democrats is we're reaching out to young people and trying to connect them to young candidates who are also in our race this year. And so we're really, really excited about this opportunity because we have a number of young candidates that we really want to get elected. And so... Now, before we go too far, let's explain that a charter amendment is, well, the city and county is a corporation. That's number one. The entire island is a corporation. That's why it's called the city and county of Honolulu. Now, and all corporations have a charter by which they function. So all corporations have it. A charter amendment is a part of amending the charter by which the city operates. And what you're saying is the charter amendment number two is the one that you want to support. Now, to get a charter on the ballot has to go through hearing after hearing after hearing and people testify for and against and yes, we want it, no, we don't want it and whatnot. So to get to be on the ballot means it has survived all of those steps. Now, how do we, well, what do we do to make sure that everybody that votes understands that they need to vote for the charter amendment also? We have been in discussions internally to figure out what methods do we want to utilize in order to inform the public? Because one thing we've definitely noticed is that when people don't know what they're voting on, they tend not to vote at all. They'll just skip it. They'll be like, oh, I don't know what that is. I don't wanna say yes or no. What benefit will that have for the city and the community? And we want them to know that the benefit of charter amendment two is that we give representatives to youthful people to be in city hall and ask questions and advocate on behalf of youth in the city. And youth are our future and we want them to be extremely successful if we want to have great roads. We wanna have representatives who can push for that. If we want to have affordable housing for them, then we want to have representatives who will push for that. If they have an interest in climate change and making sure that the health of the air and the water and the soil is very good and we are missing that voice. And so that's what this charter amendment is for. It's to give voice to those who at the moment are voiceless until they're 18 and they can vote and really influence our government in that particular manner. It gives also a great leadership opportunity to these young people to start learning about city government, to learn the levers and to figure out and organize to be successful at the campaigns that are of interest to them. And young people's perspective can be extremely helpful, youthful ideas and not just young people always but young ideas and new ideas that can change our government for the better are really the lifeblood of democracy that in like actually voting in our representative democracy. And so it's so important that you brought up earlier that people need to vote not just for the president and then skip over everything else but they need to vote for all of these different representatives and they should spend some time getting to know them if can too. Well, what about the other charter amendments? Do you know the rest of them? How many there are? There are four. Two of them have to do with the ethics commission. One has to do with term limits for the prosecutor's office and one is charter amendment number two that we'd like people to vote yes for. It's to create this youth counseling commission for the city. Now, I have to tell you the last time there were charter amendments on the ballot, I decided as a campaign of one to make a button that said no on 15, nothing else, no on 15. And everywhere I went, people would say, what is that? And then I would tell them, it gets rid of the term limits for the mayor and the prosecutor and no, I don't want Kirk to have any more time. No, it was the first time that there was a huge turnout for charter amendments because people paid attention but all I did was that was it, no on 15. And I went everywhere in the store and of course everything was open in those days and people actually paid attention to the charter, the charter amendments. And if there's a question that comes from the state, the charter comes from the city count. And if they're on the ballot, we need to look at them to pay attention. And the advantage now of course is that because we can do it at home, you can talk about it to your spouse or whoever. What does this mean? How does this impact me? Because if you're in the booth and you read it and they said, oh my goodness, what does that mean? So now that you're home, you can talk about it. Mm-hmm, we're very excited at the party about vote by mail and the convenience that it's provided to people. We had record turnout numbers. We haven't had numbers like this since 1998 in a primary election where 51% of registered voters across the state voted and that's fantastic. Not since 1998, if we had that. And so we had people voting on things and they had time to look up the candidates and make informed decisions. Whereas if they had walked into the election day polling place and seen these charter amendments for the first time, they are gonna skip them sadly enough. And we are really excited about the opportunity that some of these charter amendments have in most especially number two, to give voice to additional people across the city. Well, I'm excited about it because like I said, that is something that you can market successfully with all young people to take a look at that so that if they are interested in charter amendment two, even though they can't vote, but they can surely tell their parents vote for that one. So I think this is a marvelous opportunity that we tend to think that all of our energy is into the president as it should be because that affects everybody for a very long time. But all of these offices, I don't think we know who the prosecutor's name is. Well, I guess since they had such trouble, everybody knows about the prosecutor. But who is the prosecutor? What does the prosecutor do? Do we know? Do we have any idea? And how long is his term? And if you read the description of this, of who the prosecutor can be, it's like, well, that sure narrows the prosecutor has to be somebody that has been in the court and has tried cases for at least the last two years. Well, that sure limits, but nonetheless, that's a difference. Well, what are these offices that we're voting on? What do they mean? How is the city and county different from the state? And we're voting for both members of the city council and members of the legislature. So there's so much to talk about that for young people to have a voice with their parents as they're voting. I like this guy because of this. And I don't like this one because of that. But it's a great opportunity to talk about all of that. What does the legislature do? What does the city council do? All of those kinds of wonderful things that you get to talk about because you can vote at once. And they should. There should be a discussion. I remember I had great love and joy for election day as a young person, as a, let's say, like a second grader to maybe sixth grader, going into the booth with my dad and getting lifted up and to flip the switches. It was the most wonderful experience to be apart. Oh, flip that one. Don't flip that one. Flip that one. Don't flip that one. And to know that this vote counted, that it mattered and that it would make a difference to me even though I was too young. And so parents and kids can have that experience with the ballots as they arrive in the mail. Maybe an assignment of, look these people up and tell me about them would be a really pleasant experience in civic engagement, as well as the opportunity to discuss and have a debate, a small debate about the pros and the cons. And this is why I'm making this decision. And one day it'll be your opportunity as well. At 16, sign up to register to vote. You can do a whole lot of influencing as a 16-year-old amongst your friends and amongst your community. And if you get on this council, because it's 14 to 24 or the age ranges, you can do an even more influencing. You can play a part in the Democratic Party as a young person. You can play a part in other civic engagement organizations. And we would love to have the skill set of young people. We would love to have the perspectives of young people. And we'd like to pass laws and legislation that disproportionately assist those folks because oftentimes they are the ones most in need across our community in different districts, city council districts and state representative districts. We need to know how to contact you at the Democratic Party. Can you give us a contact email or for the party? Or how do we... So if we have young people, how do they connect you? How do they get involved? So the number one way to get involved with the party is to join the Democratic Party. And you would just go to our website, Oahu Democrats. It is free. And then you get to vote in the presidential primary as well. And so you go to OahuDemocrats.org and then you find the join button, click the join button and join the party. To reach me, you can find me at chrisedwardshawaii at gmail.com. And then I can help walk you through all of these steps. And we will be doing more programs to help walk people through the questions you were asking. What is the state ledge? What are the laws? How does that work? How do you get a law passed? And also what is the city council and how do they operate? And so we do lots of programming to help people better understand, Democrats better understand the government around them and how they might be able to influence it to get the better world that we want, affordable housing, climate change. Well, you know, it's been a pleasure spending this time with you. And you will come back and talk some more. We've got just a couple of what? A month or two to get all of this done before the election. So you will come back and visit with us again? Absolutely. And I do want to encourage people, if I could just have a second to vote yes on number two and to do a little research to see if you're absolutely correct. Make some buttons to say yes on two. Yes. Yes on two. That's right. Yeah. And just do a little research, make sure you're picking the right person for you. Okay. Well, great. Thank you. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. And we'll see you next time. Thanks. See you next time.