State lawmakers would like you to believe the election season begins when the legislative session ends.

That’s when they can walk away from the annual unpleasantness of yet another unproductive stint at the State Capitol and start talking in platitudes about what they’ll accomplish in the future.

With the 2026 session looming, their constituents shouldn’t give them that comfort this time around.

Instead, voters should hold legislators’ feet to the fire by letting them know in no uncertain terms before and during the session what is expected of them if they want to get reelected.

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As they watch the incumbents in action, constituents who feel they’re being ignored or fed excuses for failures need to keep pressing.

Those excuses come pretty easy to rank-and-file lawmakers: “I voted for this, that and the other thing, but those bills got killed by committee chairs mid-session or by legislative leaders right before adjournment.”

That’s not good enough. They should be pointedly asked what they did to stand up to leadership when the measures they supported were being quashed.

If the answer is unsatisfactory, their employer (that’s you) needs to start looking for new blood.

To that end, let me be the first to present you with a voters guide for the next election. Call it the pre-session edition.

Know Who You’re Dealing With

Before you can hold your legislators accountable, you need to know who they are. With the islands divvied up into 51 House and 25 Senate districts, that’s not as easy as it sounds, especially with reapportionment and resignations occasionally juggling the legislative lineup.

Type your address into the “Find Your Legislator” box on the legislative website and it’ll tell you what districts you live in. Then enter that information in the same box and you’ve got the names of the senator and representative who work for you.

And now you can go to work on them. Plugging one of their names into the search engine at the top of the Civil Beat homepage is a great place to start.

High among the results should be their responses to the Civil Beat Q&A surveys from previous elections. Here the candidates explain their stands in their own words. What were their priorities? What were their promises?

Many candidates come across as quite reform-minded in the Q&As when they answer questions about improving state government transparency, and yet the main measures to do just that fail every session. When you contact your legislators, it might be effective to remind them of their stands in those surveys.

If you don’t find their Q&As, that means they didn’t respond (unless they’re newly appointed and never had to campaign for their office). And you might ask yourself (or better yet, ask them): Who turns down an opportunity to communicate directly with voters?

Another tool to follow your legislators is Civil Beat’s Digital Democracy database, which tracks every word spoken in public hearings, every dollar donated to politicians, every bill introduced and every vote cast.

Decide On Your Priorities

Their office email addresses and phone numbers are on our Digital Democracy site as well as the legislative website, but before you make contact with your senator and representative you should zero in on what you want out of them next session.

The possibilities are nearly endless.

— Looming adjustments in the massive income tax cuts approved in 2024 are likely on everyone’s personal front page. The governor has called for preserving the cuts for lower income taxpayers while possibly reducing the tax relief for those who are wealthier.

Whether you’re looking out for yourself or approaching this more altruistically, you may want to be heard on where you think the lines should be drawn.

— As mentioned above, legislators like to sound reform-minded during election season, but they’re not always ready to go to the mat for those reforms when leadership looks to quietly derail them.

Examples include bills addressing Hawaiʻi’s culture of pay-to-play politics by prohibiting big campaign donations from people connected to government contractors and grantees; evening the electoral playing field by increasing public campaign finance; and slapping term limits on legislators just as Hawaiʻi has already done for most other officeholders.

— With all the federal budget cuts, not all government services are going to continue at their current levels, and in some cases the state is looking to step in to keep them going.

Food stamps? Help with housing payments or utility bills? Public education? There’s not going to be enough state money to cover it all. So why not tell your legislators what you want preserved, then monitor their votes to see if they share your priorities?

— Every session Hawaiʻi legislators leave millions of dollars in potential tax revenue on the table by refusing to legalize recreational marijuana and/or gambling.

Whether you agree or disagree with the moralistic streak that runs through public life in the islands, you might want to let your lawmakers know where you stand because there is big money at stake here.

These are just a few areas to consider. What’s important is for you to a) decide what you want out of your legislators; b) tell them; and c) watch closely to see if you get it.

Informed voting will follow.

Making Your Vote Count

Keep a close eye on your legislators during the session and you should know by the time they adjourn if they merit your support at the ballot box. Then it’s time to think strategically, especially in regards to the August primary.

Every election season all of the House and about half the Senate seats are on the ballot. When they receive their primary ballots, voters must make the crucial decision regarding which party’s races they want to participate in.

Because Hawaiʻi is dominated by the Democratic Party, the primary is the most crucial election and the most competitive races often involve Democrats. So you might want to choose to vote in that party’s contests even if you don’t consider yourself a Democrat. (Remember that even some of the candidates who run as Democrats only do so because it’s the easiest way to get elected in the islands).

Less frequently, there’s a competitive primary race involving Republicans that might entice you to vote in that party’s contests even if the GOP is not typically your thing.

The general election if less complicated because you can vote for whoever you want without any part restrictions.

The most important thing is to vote — Hawaiʻi’s primaries suffer from shockingly low turnout, and that needs to change before anything else changes.

Finally, all of this is predicated on not giving in to the apathy that is frankly a reasonable response to Hawaiʻi’s entrenched political power structure.

The powerbrokers can’t maintain their chokehold on rank-and-file legislators unless those lawmakers continue to allow themselves to be cowed into submission. The trick is to get them to respect — even fear — you the informed voter.

Impossible? Remember that it was only last year that a reform-minded challenger defeated the speaker of the House in the Democratic primary.

Election season starts now.