Voting has ended in what is being touted as the nation’s first all-digital election, and city officials say it has been a success.
Some 115,000 voters in Honolulu’s neighborhood council election were able to pick winners entirely online or via telephone. The voting, which started May 6, ended Friday.
City officials say the experiment appears to have generated few problems; it has even saved the financially strapped city around $100,000.
“It is kind of the wave of the future,” said Bryan Mick, a community relations specialist with the city Neighborhood Commission, “so we’re kind of glad in a way that we got to be the ones who initiated it.”
The “neighborhood board” system is in serious decline. This story doesn’t mention that 1/3 of the districts, including mine, never got the chance to vote because there weren’t enough declared candidates even to fill the seats. These districts are governed soviet style, where the present members are automatically reelected and fill any vacancies by appointing their friends. The last mayor created a competing system, called “Vision Teams,” which he tried to stack with his own supporters and used to get around the neighborhood boards and create his own structure.