Tiebreaker for Hawaii state House primary leaves egg on election officials’ faces
Confusion began with drawing plastic eggs to decide primary winner & ended with court putting embattled primary candidates on general election ballot
Elections shouldn’t be comedies, yet the avoidable problems turned a Republican primary for Hawaii’s House District 43 into a laughingstock election.
The Republican primary on Aug. 8 ended with an 842-842 tie between incumbent Kanani Souza and challenger Sheila Medeiros.
The results:
Two Democrat voters mistakenly got Republican primary ballots, and it’s unclear if they voted in the race.
Chief election officer Scott Nago and election specialist Ray de Vega broke the tie by drawing plastic Easter eggs from a luahala basket to decide which candidate won the primary. Medeiros won the drawing.
A Hawaii Supreme Court decided that because it’s possible that the two mistakenly distributed Republican ballots could have affected the outcome, the general-election ballot would contain a primary re-do for that state House office.
In that primary within the general-election ballot, there’s an instruction that says “Republican Party Voters Only.” Hawaii does not register voters by party, and it’s absurd to presume that non-Republicans will follow this unenforceable instruction. The result will end up with more non-Republicans voting in the do-over primary than the two Democrats who may have inadvertently voted in the original primary, the reason for the mini primary.
Hawaii lacks clear laws and regulations to handle tie votes. There was another tied race decided by the same Easter egg drawing, but it lacked the issue of mistakenly distributed primary ballots.
Adding to the chaos, the drawing happened as Tropical Storm Lala bore down on the state, and the livestream could not be viewed by the public.
The bright side? No other candidates are running, so all voters will get to choose instead of just primary voters.
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