Award given to state legislature's most dishonest "gut and replace" legislation. Honolulu, HI — Today, Common Cause Hawaii and The League of Women Voters of Hawaii announced that this year’s Rusty Scalpel Award for most unconstitutional state legislation was given to HB 862 “Relating to State Government,” for its overly-broad scope, ever-changing intent, and lack of transparency throughout the bill-to-law process. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser urged Governor Ige to veto the legislation, which he included on his intent-to-veto list...

(Honolulu) – During a 2021 Hawaii State legislative session that started amid a surging global pandemic with the Capitol closed to the public and legislators focused on a dire local economic outlook, Common Cause Hawaii understood that democracy was still our mission. We continued to remind our elected officials that we need to ease access to voter registration for our citizens, we must restore confidence in our government through ethics reform, and we need more transparency and accountability in our government. Common Cause Hawaii remained...

There has been misleading messaging trying to scare Hawaii about automatic voter registration (AVR), but we know better. Some people, including elected officials, are saying that AVR will let voters’ private data become public. This is just plain false. Hawaii has a longstanding law in place specifically to protect people’s voter registration data — Hawaii Revised Statutes § 11-97 — and the current AVR bill moving in the Legislature, Senate Bill 159, SD1, will not change that. A county clerk may not disclose voter registration...

Opinion by Sandy Ma, Common Cause Hawaii's Executive Director: Hawaii has a long and noble history of promoting voting among its people. During this Women’s History Month, we proudly remember that under the first Constitution of the Hawaiian Kingdom, women sat and voted alongside men in the legislative sessions of the House of Nobles.

Hawaii’s elected officials, especially state leadership in the House and Senate, understand that automatic voter registration will eliminate barriers to registering to vote, especially for...

Hawaii’s vote-by-mail process adopted in 2019, prior to the advent of the coronavirus, was proven emphatically to work. It significantly increased Hawaii’s disgracefully low voter turnout rate, even in the middle of a pandemic. Voter turnout increased by more than 16% over the previous primary in a general election year, and by more than 14% over the prior general election!

Even though Hawaii’s mail-in balloting process was successful, improvements should still be made.

This column was authored by Sandy Ma,...

Certainly, vote-by-mail works for voters who have stable, long-standing addresses to which ballots can be mailed. Unfortunately, vote-by-mail does not work equally well for all. Housing-insecure voters, voters needing language assistance and those incarcerated who have not lost their right to vote are just a few of the voters that a mail-in voting system does not adequately reach, according to civil rights organizations such as the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and even proponents of mail-in ballots like Vote at Home.