The Wednesday meeting of the Hawaiʻi Elections Commission was unlike all others over the past three years in that Commissioner Ralph Cushnie, an outspoken election skeptic, didn’t say much.

He didn’t have to. Nearly all of the dozens of people who testified during the lengthy Zoom meeting, as well as some of Cushnie’s fellow commissioners, were singing from the Cushnie hymnal.

It goes like this: There is something wrong with the way Hawaiʻi counts its mail-in ballots. The county and state elections offices need to be independently audited. The state’s chief elections officer needs to be disciplined or fired. Nothing less than voter integrity and the credibility of democracy in Hawaiʻi rides on it.

And now results of a commission investigation seem to back him up.

Cushnie joined the panel in January 2024 but has been raising concerns about election integrity since at least 2022. Up until now he has not persuaded a majority of the nine-member commission, or local courts, that his concerns hold water.

But last month a commission-directed investigative panel tasked with examining the 2024 general election on Kauaʻi found inconsistencies between state and county vote totals. The permitted interaction group was appointed by the Elections Commission and is comprised of three of its nine commissioners.

According to the group, the official result for Kauaʻi County was 661 votes greater than what the county reported. The complaints lodged by Cushnie and others, the group concluded, are valid.

Chief Elections Officer Scott Nago didn’t take part in Wednesday’s meeting and declined an interview request. But he did release a letter insisting the investigative panel is way off in its calculations.

Both sides say they don’t understand how the other came up with such vastly different counts. Members of the investigative panel have complained that county and state officials have not been forthcoming in their responses, even though it is the commission’s responsibility to investigate complaints.

But Cushnie’s concerns are now being taken seriously by the full commission, which in the past has often voted 5-4 in support of the Elections Office.

The commission, which met only twice during the first six months of the year, met twice in July and is scheduled to convene again Aug. 27 to decide what to do about the report’s recommendations, which include calling for audits of the county and state vote-counting processes.

As if that were not enough to give the commission’s work a sense of urgency, Cushnie also claims that the official state tally for Hawaiʻi County’s election in November is more than 19,000 votes greater than what the county itself reported. That figure amounts to almost one-fourth of the total turnout of Big Island voters.

Nago has not responded to those allegations.

A second investigative group is already looking into the mail-in ballots for Hawaiʻi County — about 90% of all Big Island ballots cast in the Nov. 5 election. Most races were not close, but the contests for Hawaiʻi County mayor, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs trustee for Hawaiʻi island and a state representative were decided by far less than 19,000 votes.

Cushnie said he is basing the 19,000-vote discrepancy claim on his own research, something that has yet to be corroborated by the group looking into it.

Political Divide

There are two commissioners for each of the four counties. Four are appointed by Republican legislative leaders, while four others are appointed by Democratic legislative leaders. The commission chooses its own chair, currently Michael Curtis, who was appointed by the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court chief justice.

Elections Commission meetings over the past several years have sometimes felt like a circus. Conducted over Zoom, they last for hours, much longer than the typical government watchdog meeting, and are marked by tension.

They have been dominated by conservative voters, many of them affiliated with the Hawaiʻi Republican Party and several of them failed GOP candidates. Some testifiers connect allegations of voter fraud in Hawaiʻi to President Donald Trump’s false narrative that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Others see a direct line between the government’s response to the pandemic and the continued dominance of the Democratic Party in Hawaiʻi — even as the nation appears to have turned rightward and the GOP has gained influence locally.

But now there is a reported paper trail showing a discrepancy in Kauaʻi’s election results — specifically, in the “chain of custody” that starts with a voter filling out a mail-in ballot, placing it in the mail or a county dropbox, the collection and counting of the ballots by the county, their delivery of receipts for those ballots to the state Office of Elections in Honolulu by the U.S. Postal Service and the final count and certification of the final results.

At the July 30 meeting, Peter Young, one of two commissioners leading the permitted action group, said there was “no plausible explanation” for the discrepancy offered by the Kauaʻi County Clerk’s Office or the state Elections Office.

Like Nago, Kauaʻi County Clerk Jade Fountain-Tanigawa did not participate in the Zoom meeting. But Nago did provide Civil Beat with a copy of a July 29 letter to Curtis and other commissioners that essentially refutes what the investigative group found.

Nago said in his letter, which is posted online, that the official record of mail-in return ballots “aligns” with what was collected by the Kauaʻi County Elections Division and is “consistent with the number of ballots counted and reported by the counting center.”

But Nago also reported that there was a difference in two of the counts — a difference of four return envelopes between what was collected from the drop boxes and what was reported in the mailed receipts, and a difference of 21 ballots in the transfer of return envelopes to the counting center on Kauaʻi.

Obviously those discrepancies are far less significant than what the permitted action group found.

“We recognize that the differences may be attributed to human errors in the hand count and hand-written record,” Nago wrote.

It’s not clear from Nago’s letter whether the vote differences he was referring to altered the final tally of 27,057 mail-in ballots for Kauaʻi — about 90% of all ballots cast there.

Asked for comment Thursday, Nago told Civil Beat, “The report speaks for itself.”

Fountain-Tanigawa, who is copied on Nago’s July 29 report, did not respond directly to a media inquiry.

But an email Thursday from the elections division in her office to Civil Beat said, “We are uncertain of the methodology used by the Election Commission’s Permitted Interaction Group so we cannot comment on the numbers that they presented. We agree with the numbers presented by the State Office of Elections and thank them for getting the report completed on such short notice.”

Commissioner Lindsay Kamm, who worked with Young on the Kauaʻi report, said at Wednesday’s meeting that Nago’s letter failed to fully address questions from the investigative group. She described voting tabulation charts provided by Nago as “meaningless.”

“I have zero confidence in these numbers, because just saying so, just putting these numbers on a piece of paper, does not mean that they are true,” she said. “So we have to see what’s really going on. These numbers are not verified. That’s what we’re asking for — verification.”

Drop Boxes Faulted

No prominent member or elected official from the Democratic Party participated in the commission meeting. But one former GOP legislator, Bob McDermott, and two current Republican House representatives — Diamond Garcia and Garner Shimizu — tuned in.

Shimizu, who was elected in a close race in 2024 after having lost several prior elections, testified that it was critical the commission do its best to be transparent and accountable in its work.

“Keep striving for truth and justice,” he said.

Other testifiers wanted the commission to also examine the counting of ballots in Maui County and the City and County of Honolulu.

The commission’s work is getting the attention of nonpartisans. Judith Mills Wong of the League of Women Voters of Hawaiʻi testified that she appreciated “the professional and constructive way the process was carried out” by the Kauaʻi investigative group.

“The league will commit to supporting legislation that incorporates the recommended reforms and will call for an appropriation to implement these changes,” Wong said. “The League believes that voting is a fundamental citizen right that must be guaranteed.”

Curtis, the chair, dismissed Deputy Attorney General Jordan Ching’s advice that other commissioners not be allowed to comment on the Kauaʻi report and instead wait until the Aug. 27 meeting in order to comply with the Sunshine Law.

That allowed Cushnie to finally speak. Compared to past meetings, he kept his remarks relatively brief.

He said that “the cover-up is worse than the crime, and I hope that people start stepping forward to tell the truth as the Office of Elections narrative unravels.” He also called, as he has before, for Nago and Curtis to resign, as well as for “an audit of all county records with the assistance of the FBI.”

Curtis ended the meeting by reading a statement in which he argued that an increase in voting complaints appeared tied to the Legislature’s decision to implement statewide mail-in balloting in 2020. Initially, it was to be a pilot program on Kauaʻi.

“Since then, we’ve transitioned from same day in person precinct voting to an all mail in voting system,” he said. “This marked the first phase of what many consider an experiment new for voters, officials and the system as a whole.”

Curtis said the process can be refined to enhance transparency and public trust. 

The “main source” of chain-of-custody concerns “seems to be the use of ballot drop boxes,” said Curtis. He added that this has introduced “an additional layer that some voters consider unnecessary. Eliminating them would ensure that only registered, designated, trusted agents handle ballots throughout the process. There are many more post offices than there are drop boxes. Drop boxes are redundant.”

He concluded: “While there are other important issues to address, removing drop boxes would directly resolve the most vocal concern, chain of custody.”

“If we are stuck with mail-in balloting, drop boxes are a weak spot,” Curtis told Civil Beat on Friday.