(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...

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.