Election Commission
by Tom Yamachika, President, Tax Foundation Hawaii
This week, I can’t help but write about the state Elections Commission and how it has been paralyzed for several months in a feud with the Office of Elections. In theory, the Commission oversees the Office of Elections. The chief election officer, Scott Nago, reports to and can be replaced by the Commission. The problem, however, is that the chair of the Commission’s term of office expired on July 1. Since that date, there has been no chair.
Two individual commissioners (there are nine commissioner positions) asked the Office to set up a meeting so the commissioners could perhaps select a new chair. The Office said no, a meeting can only be called either by the chair or by a majority of the commissioners voting to do so at a meeting. Either condition, of course, was impossible to meet. The Office later said that a meeting could be called if five commissioners got together and decided on a meeting date. Trouble was, only the Office had the contact information for all of the commissioners. The individual commissioners did not know the email addresses or phone numbers of their counterparts.
In court proceedings, it came out that the Office employee primarily responsible for providing support to the Commission was worried about getting in trouble for noticing a meeting that later turned out to be unauthorized.
But if that was the correct answer, how could the Commission have ever met and have chosen a chair in the first place, when the Commission was created and had no preexisting chair?
The two individual commissioners had to sue in the Supreme Court of Hawaii to break the logjam. On October 30, the court did so. It ordered the Office to provide the staff support that the Commission was entitled to. The first order of business, that any one commissioner could request, is setting up a meeting to elect a temporary (pro tempore) chair. That, of course, would be a public meeting, not a happenstance gathering at Zippy’s or anywhere else. The Commission could then deliberate and then elect a real chair by a two-thirds vote as the governing law requires. Once the chair is elected, the Commission could then notice a public meeting to deal with all of the business items that have been accumulating ever since the terming out of the previous chair.
The real tragedy here is the loss to all of us taxpayers. The fighting with the two individual commissioners, and the need for the Hawaii Supreme Court to step in and be the adult in the room, consumed resources not only of the Office but also the time of the deputy attorneys general who were involved in the fighting, as well as the resources of the Hawaii Supreme Court which ultimately sorted the matter out. And then, the Commission itself could not do anything while it was stymied by the Office’s Catch-22.
I want to demand accountability here, but I cannot decide who to blame for this fiasco. Should it be laid at the feet of the Office of Elections and its presumably well-meaning employee who was fearful of liability? Or do we blame the deputy attorneys general for choosing to fight instead of talking their client, the Office, out of the ridiculous position it took? Or should it be both?
This is an interesting and head-scratching case study for all of us to learn from. Too bad it came at our expense.