The drama at the Oct. 29 Elections Commission meeting wasn’t just another long day of testimony and accusations. It was a reminder that who we appoint matters.

When a commission behaves erratically or talks past the evidence, that reflects a selection system that prizes familiarity and faction over competence and clarity. If we want better outcomes, we have to fix the front end: how commissioners are chosen, what skills we seek, and what we expect of them once they’re sworn in.

That truth was hard to miss during the commission’s six-and-a-half-hour meeting — a marathon of testimony that ended with a vote to launch an audit of the 2024 general election and another vote to urge the Legislature to repeal statewide vote-by-mail. The commission had already asked for that rollback on Oct. 1. This time, despite dozens of testifiers defending mail voting as secure and indispensable, a narrow majority doubled down. It wasn’t a debate about new facts. It was a display of how nine people interpret their role in a moment flooded by national narratives.

Rather than revisit that debate, I want to look at how those nine people are chosen.

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Under Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes §11-7.5, the Elections Commission’s role is to oversee the integrity of the state’s election system by holding public hearings, investigating complaints, adopting rules, appointing and evaluating the chief election officer, and advising that officer on how to strengthen the process. The technical administration of elections is handled by the chief election officer, but the commission sets the tone. Its duty is to safeguard public trust in the system that counts every vote.

The commission is composed of nine members, selected through a process that mirrors Hawaiʻi’s Reapportionment Commission. Two members are appointed by the Senate president, two by the House speaker, two by a senator from the minority party, and two by a representative from the minority party. Those eight members then choose a ninth member, who serves as chair. Each group of four appointments must include one member from each of Hawaiʻi’s four counties.

On paper, this setup seems fairly balanced. Like the Reapportionment Commission, it gives both majority and minority parties a say and ensures representation from all the islands. The National Conference of State Legislatures notes that the federal National Voter Registration Act of 1993 requires each state to name a chief election official, but lets states decide how to choose that person. In 33 states, the chief election officer is a partisan, elected official, usually the secretary of state or lieutenant governor. In six states, the governor appoints this person. In four, the Legislature does. Only seven states have a board or commission that makes the appointment.

Not every state has a board. Seventeen do, and each one is set up and appointed differently. Thirteen of these boards can be controlled by one political party. By that standard, Hawaiʻi’s bipartisan appointment system is ahead of many others. Still, recent events show there is room for improvement.

At the very least, we need clearer standards for appointments. I know this from experience. When I was House minority leader, I made appointments or recommendations to commissions and task forces. Too often, I relied on trust and reputation instead of a clear set of criteria. I never saw a list of needed skills, so I had to decide on my own what I thought was best, and I can’t say my process was thorough. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to me that was a problem because the culture around appointments makes the relationships and reputation-based method seem normal, but it shouldn’t be.

We should expect that anyone making these appointments is looking for a core set of skills, conducts a simple interview, and documents their process. But we could take it even further.

The Election Reformers Network, a nonprofit that advocates for election reform, created model legislation for states that want to create an impartial election administration to further reduce party dominance of electoral process and diversify interests on election boards.

Their proposed board would have nine voting members: a former state judge chosen unanimously by the state Supreme Court, an election law expert picked by the state bar association, two former election administrators from two different parties, and two former legislators chosen by the majority and minority leaders of the Senate. These six would then pick two people from nonpartisan civic groups and one representative from a third party or an independent candidate.

Hawaiʻi could adapt that model to fit our own needs or make smaller, incremental reforms. We could, for instance, limit legislative leaders to one appointment each instead of two and fill the remaining seats through different criteria. Perhaps we include two election law experts chosen by the state bar and two representatives from nonpartisan civic groups. We could require that the four legislative appointees and the Supreme Court’s appointee select four more members from nonpartisan civic groups representing each county.

The point is, there are options. Reform doesn’t have to mean rebuilding the whole system overnight. But it does mean acknowledging that the structure we have now can be improved, and that meaningful change could involve more than simply asking current decision-makers to exercise better judgment.

But, at a minimum, we should expect more from those decision-makers. We rely on legislative leaders and others to interpret the spirit of the law, and culture does the rest. If they publish the competencies each vacancy requires, disclose conflicts, and hold brief public interviews using the same questions for every nominee, the process will follow. If we shrug and call it “politics,” we’ll keep getting politics.

The stakes are real. When the Elections Commission loses focus, everything else becomes more difficult: administrators can’t make routine improvements, voters lose trust in helpful changes, and lawmakers spend time refereeing performative fights. When the commission is solid, the opposite happens. The work gets quieter. Improvements last. People spend less time arguing about the process and more time debating policy, which is where the focus should be.