Three HD43 August Primary ballots with Florida voter card.
by Andrew Walden
Hawaii election officials have long resisted removing Hawaii voters from the voter roll when they register and vote in other states. Finally, in 2024 Legislators passed Act 190, forcing them to clean up the voter roll.
2024 Act 190 states:
“The legislature … finds that many persons reside in Hawaii on a part-time basis. This mobile population may be registered to vote in more than one state due to outdated registration records, thus challenging the accuracy of Hawaii's and other states' voter registration rolls…. The office of elections and each county office that administers elections shall use information and services made available by Electronic Registration Information Center, Inc., to verify their respective voter registration rolls.”
In spite of the legislative mandate, the Office of Elections still hasn’t purged out of state voters from the list.
Did this policy contribute to the messy tied race in the House District 43 Republican Primary? Akamai readers will remember, the August 8, 2026 HD43 Republican Primary produced a tie vote leading to the State Supreme Court ruling ordering a Special Election to be held concurrently with the General Election November 3, 2026.
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Mervat Etinas, who now lives in Volusia County Florida with her husband and son, showed Hawai’i Free Press three HD43 Primary ballots mailed to the family’s former home in Makakilo.
The Florida Secretary of State voter website confirms that Etinas and her husband are both listed as ‘active’ registered voters in Florida—and have been since January, 2022.
This means that ineligible voters’ ballots were mailed out to a Makakilo address in five elections: Primary and General 2022 and 2024 and Primary 2026.
Hawai’i Free Press was able to find the Etinas family listed as Hawai’i registered voters in a September, 2023 edition of the Honolulu Voter List. That same list shows the Etinas’ did not vote in the two prior election cycles in Hawai’i. Says Mervat, “Yes, I voted in Florida. All three of us did. I did not vote in Hawaii as I wasn’t here at the time of the (August, 2026) primary but if I were, I could have.”
Does the Hawaii Office of Elections have a stated policy of not removing out-of-state voters simply because they have registered elsewhere?
In 2020 Civil Beat reported, Getting A Ballot In The Mail For Your Dead Relative Is Not As Weird As It Seems:
As Honolulu implements its first-ever vote by mail election, some ballots are being sent to people who are no longer living at their registered address – or are no longer living at all.
Hauula resident Thomas Adolpho said he got five ballots for renters who haven’t lived on his property in over a decade. Enele Ongoongotau Jr. said he received a ballot at his Kahuku home for his niece who moved to the mainland last year. Kaneohe resident Jennifer Nakamura has a ballot for her uncle who is incarcerated. And one woman, who didn’t want to be named, said she received a ballot for her father who died five years ago in Utah.
“It is concerning because it could give people the chance to be dishonest,” said Laie resident Halam AhQuin II, who reported receiving three ballots for people he’d never heard of. …
Rex Quidilla, elections administrator for the Honolulu City Clerk’s office, said it was inevitable that flaws in the voter registry would reveal themselves in the state’s first all-mail election.
“There are going to be dead people, people who moved away, Britney who went to college but her parents continue to receive their mail and will get a ballot,” Quindilla said.
“All these things are hidden when you have polling places because no one goes out to the polling place and no one corrects the registry. The good part about this is the very act of doing a vote by mail election will expose some of these things and, hopefully, people start to act upon these changes to the registry.”
Honolulu does take its own steps to ensure the voter rolls are as updated as possible, city election officials said. For example, the Hawaii Department of Health periodically sends the elections division a list of recently deceased people to remove from the voter registry.
However, deaths that occur out of state are not included in that, according to Honolulu Elections Specialist Doris Lam. For folks who die outside of Hawaii, the division needs a relative to sign an affidavit, and then the deceased should be unregistered.
Honolulu’s election office also reviews data from the court system to screen out incarcerated individuals and from the U.S. Postal Service to remove voters who have declared a change of address, according to Quidilla.
In a December 24, 2025 letter to the Hawaii Elections Commission, Scott Nago claims:
Ongoing projects and future improvements to the administration of elections include list maintenance via the Electronic Registration Information Center, Inc. (ERIC); and the aforementioned development and implementation of an electronic candidate filing system.
ERIC provides member states with the ability to share and compare voter registration and driver licensing data to maintain states’ voter rolls. The shared information is used to notify states when a voter has registered to vote or applied for a driver license in another jurisdiction to flag the record, starting the removal process, where the voter no longer resides. Hawaii joined ERIC in mid-2025 pursuant to Act 190, SLH 2024….
Before the transfer of data, there are two main components of testing of the connections that need to occur. The first involves the database connection between SVRS and ERIC, which we expect to be completed at the end of January 2026. The second is the testing of the connection between DOT and ERIC. Our project has had to compete with their other priorities as the DOT database is administered by the City and County of Honolulu’s Department of Information and Technology (City DIT). From our latest discussions with City DIT and DOT, they tentatively estimate that they could begin their testing in Spring 2026. The timing of DOT/City DIT testing will determine and influence the coordination with the county clerks to flag voters who may have moved out of their county to other ERIC jurisdictions and are no longer eligible to vote. …
March 31, 2026, KHON reported:
“If you receive a voter registration card for someone who is no longer residing in your household, like a child who is in college or moved to the mainland, Nago said, do not throw it away. ‘You should mark it, ‘not at this address’ and send it back. That’s the only way we can start the removal process of a voter,’ added Nago.”
The key word is “only.”
After years of empty promises, is it a buildup of ghostly ‘Nago ballots,’ rather than voter disinterest, that contributes to Hawaii’s lowest-in-the-nation voter turnout rate?
Says Mervat,“It’s obvious that mail in voting has a huge potential for major fraud.”
Neither the Office of Elections nor the Honolulu Elections Division responded to a request for comment.
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History of Hawaii Elections: