 politics and land in Hawaii with Dennis Isaki on Think That Hawaii. Today we'll be speaking with Ralph Kusni, a contractor on the island of Kauai. As a volunteer on the state board of registration, he uncovered some information regarding local elections that didn't seem right. So he went all the way to the Supreme Court. We'll find out what he learned. Please note that his comments are his own and do not formally represent the Board of Registration. Ralph, welcome to Think That Hawaii. Thank you. Ralph, please tell us a little bit about your background, starting from growing up in Hilo and on the west side of Kauai. Did you say you were seventh generation in Hawaii on your mother's side? Yes, seventh generation on my mother's side, fourth on my father's side. So the family's been in sugar. My grandfather worked for Hawaiian Electric on a Wahoo, and I had relatives that were carpenters that came over from Denmark and were shipbuilders in the whaling industry also. So kind of a diverse trade there. So you're far from being a Malihini. First, do you work for another contractor with your wife, Laura, as your boss? Yes, I met my wife, Laura. She was my boss. The other contractor that we worked for, and we got married and we started our own business about 15 years ago. Okay, yeah, we spent some time fishing together at Ni Hao. That was fun. Ralph, please tell us a little bit about the Board of Registration first. The Board of Registration is designed to hear appeals from voters who've been challenged as far as their residents. If somebody challenges another voter's residency that they can vote on the island of Kauai, the county clerk will give a ruling and if it's challenged, then the Board of Registrations will hear that challenge. And with the Board, you had some information that didn't seem right. We don't want to sound like Donald Trump in disputing a voter count, but you had some discrepancies or inconsistencies. You said you found out. And can you please tell us a little bit? Go ahead. Can you tell us a little bit about it? So when I got on the Board, I didn't know anything about the elections. So I wanted to find out everything that I could and I didn't even know where the elections office was. So I had to start with that, figure out where that was, and then I set up a meeting with the county clerk and the head of elections and had about an hour meeting with them, asked them what they did, and they described everything to me. And two things kind of stuck out as far as the 2020 election goes. So I asked for the drop box and mail-in ballots, information, chain of custody information for the 2020 election. And there was no chain of custody. They had misplaced all the chain of custody information for 2020. But they did have a summary sheet. So I took the summary sheet and I added it up. And I compared it to what the state had and there was a 3,379 vote difference. So prior to that, going, let me back up a step, but I got some analysis from prior elections prior to going into there. And starting in, if you can see this chart, I'll try to hold it up. But what this chart shows, let's see if it comes into focus or not, there we go, is that there's an inverse relationship between Democrat and Republican voting. So if a Democrat, if this first one here, Republican got a lot of votes, the Democrats were down. That's in 2004, 2008, the Democrat votes were up, the Republicans were down. And you go on down the line, 2012, Obama's popularity went down and the Republican vote went up a little bit. And then 2016, Hillary Clinton was less popular here. And Donald Trump picked up a few more votes. So what's interesting about this chart is that in 2020, Donald Trump picked up a lot of votes in Hawaii, and with the rule of inverse relations, you would expect that the Democrat number would be close to the Republican number. So what happened instead in 2020 is that number, the Democrat voting went way, way, way, way up. So two things to take away from this graph. One is that nobody talks about, the Republicans got the largest percent increase in votes in the nation. So Hawaii had the largest percentage increase in Republican votes. The other thing that's interesting is that Joe Biden was more popular than Barack Obama in the state of Hawaii. So there's different ways you can view this graph or look at it. But the long story short, there was a lot more voters that voted in 2020 than any other election. So you can attribute that to mail-in, different things that happened. But when I went down and asked for the Dropbox data and I added it up and the county had received 30,702 ballots. The state reported counting 34,081 ballots. So I went back and I emailed the county and I said, hey, aren't these numbers supposed to be the same? So the county's responsibilities, as I understand it, is that they receive ballots and then they compare them to signatures on file and they make sure that the voters, a registered voter has a proper signature on file. They sort those ballots into the 16 precincts and then they give them to the state to count. So what I was asking the county is, if you only received 30,702 ballots, how did the state count 34,000? So the difference is 3,379 ballots. So I got several answers. One was that it was a manual miscount over time. And I wrote back and I said, I don't believe that you can miscount or not count one in 10 ballots. I just, I don't think you can be that bad at it. So the final answer, the official answer that I got is that the county receives ballots and they do not have an official count. They only have an approximate count. And the only reason why they have a count is to allocate manpower for the counting of the ballots. And so I wrote back and I said, okay, I do not understand this. The county has a chain of custody protocol. When they go to each drop box, they're supposed to fill out forms, keep logs, it's a protein page protocol. It's called the place of deposit collection procedure. And they're supposed to keep all of the data and know how many ballots are in their possession at any time. But what they're telling me is that they only have an approximate count. And the ballots in their possession, they don't know how many they have. They don't know how many they picked up. And that's the answer that I've been given. And it doesn't pass the smell test. So, Ralph, is this the primary or the general election? So this was the 2022 election. General election is what I'm talking about. So I started talking to them prior to the primary, before the primary election. And I found out these discrepancies. So we had no chain of custody information. They had lost all of the chain of custody information. All of those records are supposed to be held for two years. And there was a 3,379 vote difference. So within my email chain, the state got tagged onto the email. And they proceeded to tell me that they do all these things to check the election. And they brought up specifically a law. It's called HRS 1642, which ensures that the ballots are being counted correctly. So I didn't know what that meant. And when I got the email, it was on a Friday afternoon, I said, I'm going to do research on this law. Send me all of your audit information on this law. And what you did to audit the vote in 2020. So they sent me a one page paper with signatures from all people from Oahu, the elections officials from Oahu. So nobody from the island of Hawaii was involved with the audit. And nobody, there's no other documentation. I was not given any other documentation on that audit. But one of the things they said was that we follow HRS 1642, which I'm going to get to in a minute. But as far as I can tell that has not been done and is not being done on any of the elections. So let me, let's see. So moving forward to 2022, we were on the email chain. They said, we're getting ready for the 2022 primary. We can't talk to you anymore. We're going to, we're going to get ready and going our way. So what I asked them to do is I said, please have a daily auditable accounting of the, the ballots that you get through Dropbox, through the mail. As far as I know, the mail, when it comes in, they give them a receipt that says how many ballots come in. And there's a whole place that the positive collection procedure work of documents are supposed to be kept. When I received the 2022 data, the first two days were missing. So there's 1905 ballots that have no chain of custody documentation. So the county is telling me that they don't have the documentation, but chain of custody was not lost. And I don't, chain of custody is having the documentation, is my understanding of it. So I'm a little confused by their, by their answers. And I, there's a whole chain of emails asking back and forth for this information. And long story short, in 2022, they're also telling me they do not keep accurate numbers, the numbers that they have are strictly to allocate manpower. And I just, it doesn't pass the smell test in my opinion. So getting more, the word out there so these things can be logged is, is important. So the bigger picture when I, when I started looking into this is who counts the vote? Do you know the answer to that question? Both corners. Do you know who counts the vote? It's part inner civet is a company hired out of Austin, Texas, counts the vote. Who audits, who checks to make sure that they're doing the count properly? He's supposed to have people from both sides of the aisle. I'm guessing Republicans, right? The audits are not being done correctly per law. So HRS 1642 is a law that says that you're supposed to compare 10% of the precincts and compare the results of two randomly for the island of Kauai is two randomly chosen precincts. And you get the original paper ballots, you randomly pick two precincts, you get the paper ballots from those two precincts and you handpound them and compare the results to see if the computers are counting accurately. What they are doing is two, in my opinion, sleight of hands. The first audit that is done is a logic and accuracy test, something to that effect. But they preselect the ballots to be audited and they take, they preselect a batch of ballots and they put them in the computers first and those are the ones that are being audited. So in an audit, the word random comes up. And when the voting machine and when the company heart intercept is picking which ballots are audited, that's not an audit. They're controlling everything. And the ballots are counted, everything has gone through and miraculously everything is correct. A way to do that would be have the observers randomly pick a ballot batch and then audit that ballot batch as the election is going. You can pull that off the side. So that's the first red flag. The second audit, the post audit that's being done, is they're taking their, they actually randomly selected two precincts. However, they're not taking the paper ballots, they're using ballot images to audit the precincts. So when they get the ballot image, the ballot image is controlled by heart and their civic. And there's no way to know if everybody knows what Photoshop is, those ballot images can be changed. I'm not saying they are being changed, but the law clearly says that your supposed to audit with the paper ballots, the original paper ballots. And that is the verifiable, that is the, I forget the language, but it's the that's the verifiable vote. That's the original document that came from the voter and that's what needs to be counted. So when you do the ballot images, it could be changed, somebody could hack in, it could be changed, somebody could hack in, you would never know. And if you take, say county council rates, you can look at the number results on one side and you can look at the names on the other side. If names and results were switched around, how would you ever know that they're different? How would you ever know that the second place wasn't actually the eighth place and that the third place wasn't actually the fifth place in the first, you know, how would you know those aren't flipped? And on the mainland, they've had instances where it was just a clerical error where those names were switched. And that could be the difference between somebody being on the council or not being on the council and somebody being the head of the council or not being the head of the council. But Ralph, if once we lose the chain of custody to the consultant and then we want to take it back, even if you get the paper ballot, you could say the same thing, they already had control of it, so you're not 100% sure, right? Well, the paper ballots, you're going to tell if they've been changed. You don't know if there's some loss or whatever. Well, then you're going to find that out in the count, so let's take 2020, but they didn't even know they had a discrepancy until I brought it up, okay? If the paper ballots, one in 10 paper ballots were supposedly missing from when the county collected them, they collected nine out of 10 that the state said they counted. If they would have taken two precincts and taken the paper ballots out, they would have noticed a number of differences, even if they just counted the ballots and didn't even see who won the races, they would have figured out that there was a discrepancy. They might have, unless all of the mistake was in other precinct. Correct, correct. And that's, I don't, I'm just saying what the law says right now. I don't agree with the way this whole thing is being done, but the law clearly says you're supposed to do 10% of the precincts, which Kauai is 16, is 1.6, so rounds up the two and that's documented. So what happened to that 1900 missing ballots? The 1900 and the 2022? Yeah. We don't have the chain of custody documentation. So they're saying the county is telling us that they never, they don't have the documentation, but they never lost chain of custody. So the way this place of deposit collection procedure reads is the documentation is the chain of custody. So they're kind of missing words at the moment. So the big picture, I can go, they did one last audit and the audit was done on a batch of ballots. A batch of ballots has a ballot batch report. So if my understanding is a batch of ballots is kind of a handful of ballots that will fit into a computer and it'll count at one time. So let's say the number is 200. They'll take a batch of ballots and they will pull them out and there's a ballot batch report on that batch of ballots. They'll count, they'll pick a race and they'll compare the numbers to the ballot batch report. The problem with this audit is it doesn't add to any. So we have requested getting all of the ballot batch reports because it seems like the ballot batch report is the accurate number, is the accurate tabulation of a ballot batch, but they do not add all of the ballot batch reports to get a total number. So again, it's another sleight of hand where the ballot batch report, they'll add the ballots in that ballot batch. It adds up, but it doesn't total to anything except for that single report. Now, if they would release all of those reports, then we would have something that we could audit, if that makes sense. Then you would have a random audit that would, but that sample size is not large enough to do much with. Even the 10% of the precincts is a very small sample size. So like you say, if it was all in one precinct, all of the, that 3,000, then you wouldn't catch it. But you should, that they print out precinct reports for each precinct. So you can pick it up from there. And when you compare the ballots to the actual precinct report, then you should be able to pick up if there's across the board deviations, if you will. Okay. So with all the discrepancies, you went all the way to the Supreme Court. Tell us what you found out from that. The case that I put into the Supreme Court was, I said, there's election fraud on part of the officials. I notified the state elections office, the county elections office prior to the 2022 primary. And I said, you guys are not doing the audits correctly. And you're not keeping count of the ballots correctly. And I went through in detail on that and said, please do the audits according to law and be able to describe how you did the audits. Well, they didn't reply to any of my emails. I talked to observers. They told me the audits were done on the ballot images for the post audit. And they were done with a pre-selected, the first batch of ballots on the primary audit, the first audit that was done. So both of those do not pass the audit. They're not random. And they're not with the original paper balance. So I went to the state supreme court and I said, there's election fraud on the part of the election officials. And they are willingly not doing their job, which there's a line item in the toy revised statutes about election fraud. And it specifically says that if an election official does not do their duties according to law that is the election fraud, the states, the state supreme court ruled not on the merits of the case. They said they are not allowed to rule on the election fraud in a primary election, only a general election. So they said basically, there is no general election to nullify. And I asked for them to nullify the election until the audits were done properly. They said there's no general election to nullify. So relief cannot be granted in our case. So we'll see what happens in the general election. There was something that said that they do something only to make a difference in the election also, right? Well, they said they're the only thing the supreme court can do is rule on which candidate won. And so I specifically said I'm not advocating for a candidate. I'm just advocating that the lobby followed. And I think there's everybody can say that they're scratching their heads with the primary results on both sides of the ticket Democrat side and the Republican side saying, hey, something is something is fishy. And if they would do the audits, it would just it would support what they're saying. And by them not doing the audits per law, it just makes you think more that something the various might be happening. And why are they going through sex extremes to not do the audits properly? Right. Okay. We don't have too much time left. So so the big where do we go from here? Well, the big picture that I want everybody to aware of is that the elections used to be decentralized. It was in one day. The ballots were counted in one day. And in each precinct, they were counted. Okay, they were tabulated and we had the count in one day. We have centralized the election. So it's only being counted in one spot. Hard inner civic is counting the votes. Nobody is looking over their shoulder to see they control everything they control the audit they control which ballots are being audited and how it's being audited. So nobody is allowed you're not allowed to look at the source code of the machine. And you're not allowed to look at the paper ballots and compare the county. That's the problem. And so where did we go from here? We need to go back today of voting and get rid of the voting machines because the voting machines cannot be trusted. You can hack into them. There's all kinds of stuff that both sides of the party, Democrats in 2016, Republicans in 2020 all claimed that the elections were hacked. Everybody knows it can be hacked. We just need to get rid of the machines and go to all paper ballot, one day voting in person, IDs, and that would solve most of our issues. Yeah, thanks. Sounds like in this 1970s I was working in the Marshall Islands and on Marjorie they throughout the Marshall Islands there was a referendum. It was an election to see what kind of governance they would do, what become a separate nation. And they had this big warehouse with the ballots and just happened that my coworker and I borrowed that warehouse and we were together with all the ballots to supervision. And then later on they said, hey, we got to get a picture. Nobody got a camera so they borrowed my Instamatic camera, got some official pictures of the ballots sound something like that in the 1970s. Anyway, thanks for your time. Sorry, we were running out of time right now, Ralph. Mahalo to our guest, Ralph Kusni. Mahalo to our viewers and think tech Hawaii. If you like the, if you like the think tech free media shows, please help support think tech Hawaii. Non-profit platform with a donation. Aloha. 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, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at think tech Hawaii.com. Mahalo.