Ballots won’t land in Hawaiʻi’s mailboxes until mid-October. Still, with more than a month remaining before the election, Senate President Ron Kouchi and House Speaker Nadine Nakamura have already secured their seats without facing a single opponent.

And they have plenty of company. Of the 98 races up this year, from Congress to county council, more than a third won’t have a contested general election, and in 24, only one candidate ran from start to finish.

Most of those races are for the Legislature. In 27% of this year’s legislative races, only one candidate ever ran, so voters never had a choice. 

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In another 18%, voters could choose in the August primary, but no candidate from another party made it to November. One of those, a tied Republican primary in Kapolei and Makakilo, is being rerun on the November ballot by court order. Altogether, nearly half of this year’s legislative races were settled without a general election contest.

This isn’t new. Office of Elections results over the last five cycles show that more than a third of legislative races had no contested general election, and in about 1 in 5, only one person ever ran. The share ranged from 58% in 2018 to 17% in 2022, when every seat was up under new maps, and it has climbed back to nearly half this year. 

Nationally, 28,032 of the 40,800 elections Ballotpedia tracked through August, about 69%, were uncontested.

Most voters never see it happen. For most races, when only one candidate advances from the primary, Hawaiʻi declares that person the winner and the race never appears on the November ballot. 

That’s why Ballotpedia’s count of uncontested general election races lists Hawaiʻi at 0%. Applying Ballotpedia’s definition to the state’s own results, about a third of Hawaiʻi’s legislative seats were uncontested in 2024, slightly below the national average. But here, voters who don’t like the only name on the ballot can’t write in another one.

Hawaiʻi is one of just six states that don’t allow write-in votes, according to a 2023 report from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that ban in 1992, three dissenting justices pointed out that a third or more of Hawaiʻi’s state legislative elections in 1982, 1984 and 1986 had only one candidate. Four decades later, the share without a contested general election is about the same.

Many Politicians Have It Easy Here

Contested isn’t the same as competitive, and Hawaiʻi’s contested races usually aren’t close. According to Ballotpedia, the average margin of victory in contested state House races here topped 30 points in both 2018 and 2024, four to seven points wider than the national average for state legislative races.

That matters because a lawmaker without an opponent never has to knock on a door, defend a vote or explain what they plan to do next session. 

Voters also seem to engage more when they have a real choice. In this year’s primary, about 22% of Democratic voters and 16% of Republican voters left their legislative race blank when only one name was on their party’s ballot, roughly three times the blank rate in contested primaries.

Some of that is surely people skipping a race that didn’t need their vote. Still, the gap suggests voters notice when there’s no one to choose between.

For many voters, the only real decision happens in an August primary where they have to pick one party’s ballot. In 2024, only about half as many people voted in the primary as in the general election.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

One Possible Solution

To start with, we could let every candidate run in a single primary for state offices, with the top finishers advancing to November regardless of party. Hawaiʻi already does something close to this for county and Office of Hawaiian Affairs races, which are nonpartisan. 

Over the same five cycles, only 15% of those races had a single candidate, compared with 21% for the Legislature. And when a county race was contested, every voter got a say, in either the primary or the general. In another 16% of legislative races, the only real choice came in one party’s primary. 

It isn’t a perfect comparison, but it hints at what a single primary could do. Alaska began using an all-candidate primary in 2022, and its rate of uncontested legislative seats was 22% in 2024, while California’s top-two system left only 1% of its legislative seats uncontested.

Massachusetts shows what happens without that kind of change. Like Hawaiʻi, it has a long-standing Democratic supermajority, and 73% of its legislative seats were uncontested in 2024. This November, voters there will decide on Question 3, which would create an all-party primary. The state Democratic Party and several major unions oppose it, and their campaign argues it would give business interests and Republican voters more influence.

Where these systems already exist, partisans on both sides are pushing back: 

• Alaska voters will decide whether to repeal their top-four primary, in a push backed by Elon Musk’s money and President Trump. 
• In California, both major parties opposed creating the top-two system in 2010, and party insiders are trying to end it again after a crowded Democratic field for governor raised fears that two Republicans could take the top two spots. 
• Texas has a related fight over who gets to vote in primaries. Republicans there sued to restrict their primaries to registered GOP voters, and a federal judge paused the case so the Legislature could take up the question in 2027.

Other Possible Solutions

We could also stop hiding uncontested races. Putting every race on the November ballot and allowing write-in votes wouldn’t guarantee anyone an opponent. Still, it would let voters register their dissatisfaction instead of never seeing the race at all.

Lastly, we could make it easier to challenge an incumbent. After rejecting it in past sessions, the Legislature passed the Campaign Spending Commission’s bill this year to increase partial public financing, and it became law. However, the increase mostly catches up with inflation. Our public financing in Hawaiʻi still isn’t enough for challengers to truly take on incumbents.

To be clear, no single fix will make someone run. That still takes parties, community groups and people willing to step up. Still, the rules that produce empty ballots are rules the Legislature can change. 

Lawmakers return in January, and they should start with the ones that would give voters in these 30 districts a choice next time.