Scott Nago: Leading Hawaii Elections in an Era of Trump-Inspired Skepticism

Scott Nago has led Hawaii’s elections since 2010. His tenure has at times been tumultuous, between a lack of ballots on Oahu in 2012, hundreds of uncounted votes on Maui in 2014 and confusion over tropical storms that affected the primary vote on the Big Island the same year.

But election controversy has reached a whole new level in the Trump era, and the islands are not spared. In an interview edited for length and clarity, Nago talks about what’s new this election year, including the wave of suspicion about whether elections here are going well.

This is the first year that your office has produced an online electoral guide. How’s it going ?

Since the close of nominations, we have started to prepare the voter’s guide. The guide is being translated into Chinese, Ilocano, Tagalog and Hawaiian Olelo, but is expected to be ready by mid-July, before ballots are mailed out.

One of the things we worked on, which was a challenge for us, was to make it interactive so that voters could go to our website, put in their home address, and the candidates on their specific ballot would appear for them. That way, they wouldn’t have to go through all the candidates that weren’t on their ballot.

Can people request hard copies of the guide?

No, if you want to see hard copies you will need to go to a public library. So you’ll need to download a PDF copy of the entire guide, but then you can enter your address and see which candidates will appear on your ballot.

This will be the third election cycle involving all-mail voting in Hawaii. How does it work?

The last time we held an election in a polling place was in 2018. And even then, more voters cast mail ballots than voted in person on Election Day.

You have to go back to 2010 to find a time when more people were voting in person on Election Day. So it wasn’t as big an undertaking as you might think, because, as I said, the trend is toward more people voting by mail.

Did this have a big impact on participation?

Different factors come into play in participation. For example, in 2020, it was the first time we had mail-in voting in Hawaii, and it turned out to have the highest turnout.

But I don’t know if I can attribute that to mail-in voting, because in 2020, we had Covid. And we had a presidential election. That makes it easier to get out there and vote.

Pivoting a bit, over the years the word “beleaguered” often appears before your name in press articles. During your early years as elections chief, there was once controversy over lack of ballots on Oahu, uncounted ballots on Maui, and storm confusion on the Big Island. But what we have now is a different beast, isn’t it?

Elections have many moving parts. It takes a lot of work to master everything.

But I think we can all agree that this controversy is a national trend. You’ve seen it across the country, especially since this is a presidential election. What we’re seeing on the continent in terms of criticism of election officials is unfortunately the same thing you’re seeing here.

I would say that was not the case four years ago. What we saw on the continent did not necessarily correspond to what was happening here. Unfortunately, what we’re seeing in the news on the continent in terms of intimidation of voting and election officials, that sort of thing seems to be happening here, which is unfortunate, because it’s just not not what I thought would one day happen here.

An example of the national controversy that has spread to Hawaii is the lawsuit challenging how your office conducted the routine audit of 2022 results with digital images of paper ballots instead of the actual paper ballots. -themselves. A judge ruled in your favorbut the chairman of the state Republican Party just wrote a demanding letter that this year’s audits be conducted only with paper ballots. Do you plan to make any changes to the verification procedure?

The audit is actually there to confirm the electoral process. This is not a recount. So it simply alerts election officials whether the system is working properly or not.

An audit must be conducted before elections can be certified. However, the audit itself is not the final certification of the election, and voters still have the opportunity to challenge the election results if they still do not believe they are valid.

Clearly, the state Republican Party doesn’t like the way these audits are going. Is the process really different with digital images of paper ballots instead of the paper ballots themselves??

These are exact replicas of paper ballots. During the audit process in 2022, some official observers asked to see paper ballots in some cases. When we got the paper ballot back – because we can track it and go back to it – it was exactly the same as what it appeared on the screen.

So it’s actually an exact replica of the paper ballot, and it allows us to conduct the audit faster and more efficiently.

The elections must be final. If we did an audit on all the paper ballots, and it would take us a few weeks, people would also wonder what’s going on.

You were just reappointed by the Electoral Commission, but it was a 5-4 vote after a pretty trying public hearing with many Trumpian connotations. One of the new commissioners was a virulent critic of your office in terms of electoral integrity. Is it fair to say that you’re going to be facing the same landscape in the near future?

We’re just focused on providing election services to voters and making sure that people have access to vote and that if they want to vote, they can vote and just providing that service.

Despite all this criticism, our priority is to conduct safe and fair elections in 2024. And this will be the case for all future elections as well.

“Calling them corrupt just because you don’t believe in the election results leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. »

How does all this skepticism impact you and your office?

It’s just something we have to deal with.

One of the problems is that there is a lot of misinformation. So we need to work to correct this misinformation, making sure that the correct information is available, making sure to remind voters that if they want to get the most accurate information about the election, they need to go to a trusted source , which would be a .gov website, not social media, because there is a lot of mistrust and bad information going around.

Elections are much bigger than this office or the county clerks’ offices. We rely on a lot of volunteers, about 500 volunteers across the state, to run the election. Many of them have been doing it much longer than I have, coming back year after year, election after election, because they believe in doing the right thing. And then see their integrity called into question…

These are people who are part of the community. They are your neighbors. They are your family members. They are people you might go to church with or bump into at the grocery store. And there is all this noise. To call them corrupt just because you don’t believe the election results, it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Is “noise” affecting your ability to recruit volunteers?

So far it doesn’t appear to be the case, but it could potentially affect it. You saw on the continent where election day officials were targeted.

We don’t need as many anymore since we don’t have all the polling stations. Many volunteers are now in their 70s and 80s, and this generation is slowly retiring.

What about other employees in your office? Not that it’s easy for you, but you now have a lot of experience in this role. How does this affect some of your employees?

I’m sure it affects them. It affects me.

But they are professionals in this field. Everybody knows what they have to do. And that is what we are doing, ensuring, as I said, that the 2024 elections take place.

You work for the State Election Commission, which is guaranteed to have an equal number of Republicans and Democrats because eight of them are appointed by certain legislators. And they choose the ninth member, the chairman. Right now, that’s Michael Curtis, who is also a Republican, but he just issued a letter of support for your candidacy.

Oh, that’s nice of him.

So it doesn’t always follow party lines, right?

No, I mean, if anybody saw what we’re doing, they’d see that. Basically, we’re working toward the same goal, which is secure elections. But what they want is what we want.

Everyone wants honest elections. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want that.

Read Michael Curtis’ June 25 letter of support here: