On July 11, Hawaii state representative Mark Nakashima died. He had been running for re-election and no one had filed to run against him in the August 10 Democratic primary. Nor did anyone to file in any other party’s primary ballot in that district, nor did any independent candidate file.
Hawaii is one of only five states that bans all write-ins in all elections. Because there is no write-in space, when only one candidate files, that candidate cannot be defeated. So, voters in the First State House District effectively have lost their ability to choose their state representative.
Hawaii election law provides that the new Representative will be chosen by the Governor, from a list of three Democrats suggested by the Democratic Party. See this story.
Typical for communist Hawaii.
Sounds like the Democrat national convention.
Someone should get an injunction to require the state to accept write-in votes on the grounds that by not doing so the state is depriving the voters of their power to choose their own representative.
The voters chose the governor, so what’s the problem?
But did they ever have a choice in the first place? Nakashima passing away only revealed the problem, but he was always going to be the winner given how blue Hawaii is.
Democrat governor, democrat representative. Seems like no problem.
Hawaii has been screwed since the Bayonet Constitution. And it just keeps getting worse: Sanford Dole, John Burns, Oren Long, Daniel Inouye…
A lot of people in Hawaii don’t pay attention to politics, even more than mainland.
In 1986 a Hawaii voter sued in federal court to get write-in space on the general election ballot. The voter lived in a district in which only a Republican was on the ballot. The voter wanted to cast a write-in vote for someone else. The U.S. District Court declared the Hawaii ban on write-ins to be unconstitutional. The state appealed to the Ninth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit reversed the lower court. Then the voter appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court took the case and upheld the Ninth Circuit decision. That was a stunning loss for the right of voters to vote for whomever they wish. Twenty State Supreme Courts had ruled long ago that the state constitution required write-in space on ballots, but the U.S. Supreme Court paid no attention to that and said the state had a compelling interest in blocking write-ins, in order to preserve “stability”, a term which the decision did not define. The decision was written by Justice Byron White, who voted against minor party and independent candidate ballot access at every opportunity, from 1968 through 1993, when he retired.
The story says that an unopposed candidate in the primary is automatically elected. Generally, when a deceased person is elected, it is treated as though the death had occurred after the election, creating a vacancy in office. In Hawai’i it sounds as if vacancies are filled by the governor from a list of candidates supplied by the party.
In Texas, a political party may replace a nominee who has died. A vacancy committee will choose a replacement for Sheila Jackson Lee.
A better system is to cancel an election when a candidate dies, and hold a special election.
@RW,
What does it matter if a state supreme court of some other state said that write-in votes were required under that state’s constitution? That other state is not Hawai’i’s boss. The idea that there is a constitutional right to vote for Donald Duck is Goofy.
The worst problem in Hawai’i is that someone who wants to vote for an independent candidate in the primary, has to forego participation in the Democratic (or other party) primary for other offices.
The real solution is to adopt a party-agnostic system like Louisiana, Washington, California, or Alaska.