You’re probably over the elation you felt when “your” candidates won their races. It’s also time to stop whining about the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that permitted those other candidates to be elected as well. It’s a done deal.
What will get done from this day forward depends on working with the “ins,” the new and reelected office holders, including the ones we didn’t vote for.
The Election by the Numbers
The mathematics of elections are always interesting, and almost always disappointing to anyone who looks closely. The numbers for the election of 2006 go beyond disappointing whether you like the results or not. Charmaine Tavares will be the Mayor of Maui County as of Jan. 2, 2007. Current Mayor Alan Arakawa will be a private citizen, presumably, as of that date. But I cannot stop wondering what might have happened in the mayoral race if the 74,266 Maui adults over the age of 18 who didn’t vote—did vote.
Granted, some small number of those 74,266 potential voters would be disqualified for one reason or another—citizenship, for instance—but get this into your calculator: 19,964 people voted for Tavares and something close to 93,280 people who could have voted for her didn’t. I am not “down on” Tavares. This can be said the other way. Arakawa got 18,213 votes and almost 95,000 potential voters in Maui County did not vote for him. Either way—no matter who you like or don’t like, wanted or didn’t want to see elected—the numbers make a joke of the entire, expensive, exhausting process.
If voters don’t vote, we should save the millions of dollars that are spent here in every even numbered year and set up something far more fair. I strongly recommend rock-paper-scissors. Even a coin toss would be an improvement if the idea is to find out what the people of Maui County really want. We could set a time, say, 7 a.m. on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of the month of November. Line up all the candidates facing each other and have a referee fire a starting gun. A moderator would toss a coin into the air, and the alphabetically first candidate would call heads or tails. Moderator catches the coin and awards it to the winner—along with the office he or she was wishing to be elected to. Each race costs just 25¢, and the county gets new or reelected officials.
The benefits of this system don’t stop with the savings in dollars. We’d not have the months blighted by campaign signs. We’d not have all the lies and puffery, the promises or the evenings jammed full of candidate forums and coffee hours.
Since the state Office of Elections clearly doesn’t take elections seriously—they mess up each election in new ways… since the state government in Hawai‘i doesn’t take elections seriously—they don’t provide a voter’s handbook, and didn’t even bother with the informational mailings this year… and since the Maui people with the right to vote clearly don’t take elections seriously—they just don’t vote… I figure very few people have any right to laugh at my totally serious suggestion.
County Council
Like it or not, we had an election. Some new councilmembers will be seated in January. If you’re wishing we had elected a few more new faces, think again.
Fairly late in his first term on the County Council, Joseph Pontanilla told me that it had taken most of that term for him to get fully into the job. There’s a lot to learn about procedure, session law, areas of responsibility, division of authority and much more. New members even have to learn to cope with the bizarre and often grueling schedule of council and committee meetings, community interactions, information gathering, etc.—not to mention the basics like where the bathroom is, what your aides do, and what is legal under delicately drawn regulations like the Sunshine Law.
So you’ll understand how nerve-wracking it was for me (addicted as I am to achievement news) to consider the possibility that two-thirds of the County Council might change in this one election. The council would have slowed—yes, Virginia, there are slower speeds and lower gears than the ones you already see—to a near stop with six new members at one time. Throw the rascals out, all of ’em, is a sentiment everyone must sometimes feel, but it would be very troublesome to have that wish come true. Even if you wanted different changes, take some solace in the fact that we didn’t get too many all at once. No vote, no grumble.