by Andrew Walden
Tom Cook is the winner of the Maui Council race for South Maui. That’s the word from the Hawaii Supreme Court ruling in election challenge King v Lutey, handed down December 24, 2024.
The Court ruling provides a detailed affirmation of the legality of the County Elections Office methodology for verifying mail-in ballot signatures and explains:
In response to the notice provided by the Clerk’s Office to the 1,556 voters with return identification envelopes deemed deficient, the Clerk’s Office received timely and complete responses from 594 voters to cure the deficiency thereby allowing the ballots for these voters to be counted and included in the final tally. Twenty-three voters decided to vote in-person rather than cure their deficient mail-in ballots. A total of 939 voters ultimately failed to cure their deficient return identification envelopes by the statutory deadline of November 13, 2024.
The race is noteworthy because the ‘pro-development’ candidate Cook, beat the ‘anti-development’ candidate King by 97 votes.
All it took to shift voter sentiment was Lahaina burning to the ground.
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Also on December 24, 2024, the State Supreme Court upheld the Kauai Council election results in crackpot ‘Klean House Hawaii’ case Cushnie v Nago.
Take note of how easily dismissible the crackpot arguments are:
This 2024 General Election contest is about overages. An overage occurs when the amount of ballots recorded in the official election results is more than what “documented usage” indicates.
Plaintiffs Ralph Cushnie (Cushnie) and thirty-two other voters (collectively, Plaintiffs) assert there is an overage in mail ballots that are sufficient in quantity to cause a difference in the results of the Kauaʻi County Councilmember race in the 2024 General Election.
However, the data that Plaintiffs rely on for “documented usage” contains a disclaimer that expressly states that the figures represent a manual count of envelopes and not the number of ballots counted. It is unreasonable to infer a ballot count from this data due to this disclaimer.
Plaintiffs’ December 12, 2024 Memorandum in Support also concedes that there is a difference of only 39 ballots when comparing Plaintiffs’ 27,036 envelope amount that was transferred to the state counting center and the 27,075 total mail ballots from the official results of the 2024 General Election in Kauaʻi County. This 39 ballot difference is less than the 108 vote difference between the seventh place and eighth place candidates in the 2024 General Election race for Kauaʻi County Councilmember.
We thus enter the following findings, conclusions, and Judgment in favor of the State and County, and against Plaintiffs. We also deny Plaintiffs’ motion for interrogatories.
The object lesson: Anybody with a brain could have figured this out without going to the Supreme Court. That is the hallmark of a crackpot case.
PDF: King v Lutey Ruling
PDF: Cushnie v Nago Ruling
PDF: Dicks v Nago Dec 2 2024 (another KHH crackpot case dismissed)
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HNN: Hawaii Supreme Court rejects county council candidate’s election lawsuit
SA: Hawaii Supreme Court affirms South Maui election results
BACKGROUND: