When we talk about gambling in Hawaiʻi, we often call to mind the long tradition of chicken fights, Uncle and Aunty’s semi-annual Las Vegas vacations, and, more recently, the Honolulu Police Department’s many raids on gambling dens that have become so frequent and low-key, it seems nobody gets very worked up about them, not even the gamblers themselves.

But before betting machines, Vegas buffets and secret chicken fights that everyone in a community knows about, there were the Portuguese Catholics in Hawaiʻi and their church fundraisers.

Grandma Mary used to dream of winning that big charola.

The charola was a tray or basket filled with delicacies like fresh baked bread, fancy fruit that didn’t grow in Hawaiʻi, port wine, perhaps even some linguiça sausage, all tied together with string and carried around the church social hall for everyone to admire. Grandma would buy her ticket and start praying. Eat a little coconut cake, pray. Play a few rounds of bingo, pray. Sing along to the ukulele band playing “Manuela Boy,” pray.

When the lucky winner was finally announced at the end of the event, there would be gasps, cheers, applause and, truth be told, a bit of jealousy. The winner, overcome by the blessing, would cover their face in their hands, thank the Blessed Mother and collapse into a family member’s supportive embrace as though they had won a million dollars and not just a basket of fruit.

That’s what last month’s lauhala basket silliness looked like.

The way the two tied primary election races were decided by the Office of Elections was much more like church picnic histrionics than serious American democracy. Chief Election Officer Scott Nago, who has survived 16 years in that thankless job despite, as Chad Blair put it, being “at the center of election controversy nearly every election cycle,” didn’t just pick names out of a hat. He took it to the next level of comedy with props, namely a lauhala basket, like the kind you buy at Ben Franklin to give homemade cookies to your kid’s teacher, and plastic capsules that might have come from a toy vending machine.  

It may be written in the state law to decide tiebreakers that way, but it’s totally gambling and quite unserious.

Yet there were the winners, weeping like it was an act of God rather that they get to take home all the goodies in the basket.

The whole tiebreaker weirdness overshadowed the fact that so few people cast votes in those two contests. 

In House District 43, both Kanani Souza and Sheila Medeiros won 842 votes. This is a district that had 16,419 registered voters in 2024. Democrats couldn’t even field a candidate.

In Senate District 20, both candidates tallied 1,212 votes. (The third, Rida Cabanilla, who used to be a Democrat, got 333 votes.) This is not a tiny sliver of a town. This is ‘Ewa Beach, a district with swaths of housing developments in which 58,405 people reside.

In 1959, the year Hawaiʻi became a state, voter turnout statewide was 84% in the primary and 93% in the general election. It has fallen almost every election year since. In this year’s primary, it was a shameful 33%.

What if low voter turnout is not due to apathy, disinterest or laziness, but instead anger or disgust?  What if it’s not “I don’t care” but something more like, “I refuse to play the game anymore.”

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Voting used to have a feeling of solemnity and the quiet pride of civic duty. Maybe you went with your parents to the school cafeteria on election day when you were a kid. Maybe you remember the smell of the new canvas in the curtain of the voting booth, the way your parents were extra careful like they were taking a test, the way your friendly neighbors looked a little different than usual – like they were carrying out a serious assignment. So much of the tactile, visceral, communal experience of voting was lost when we switched to all mail-in ballots, and as it is playing out, voting by mail may be easier, but it doesn’t make more people want to participate. 

And why should folks feel like they have a say in government when they can watch the representative for a community be chosen like a drawing for a 50-pound bag of rice at the company Christmas dinner or a basket of fruit and sausages at the church fundraiser?

Since the lauhala-and-plastic-egg silliness, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court has subsequently ruled that the House District 43 primary will be redone and will basically be run during the general election. Yeah, that’s not confusing. In Senate District 20, Kurt Fevella petitioned the court for basically the same sort of re-do, but he did not prevail, and Republican Bob McDermott will face Democrat Markus Owens in the primary.

The absurdity is not just from those races in that part of the island. It’s in the campaign ads paid for by big political action committees that should make candidates ashamed that they seem bought-and-paid-for. It’s the City Council not taking action on anything substantive while awarding themselves big raises. It’s all the politicians going to the Supreme Court to argue for their jobs and framing it like they’re arguing for voters’ rights. 

Solemnity and sense of civic duty has been lost in politics, both nationally and here in Hawaiʻi. We bemoan the “bread and circuses” nature of national politics. In Hawaiʻi, it’s lauhala and plastic balls and the angry realization that the job of politicians is largely about keeping their jobs.