In this episode, hosts Eric Fey and Brianna Lennon speak with Moana Lutey, the county clerk in Maui County, Hawaii.
They spoke about the impact the 2023 Hawaii wildfires had on the communities of Maui – including figuring out how to run elections. They also spoke about the efforts in Maui County to get residents to update their signatures, in an effort to ensure that every voter’s vote gets counted.
High Turnout, Wide Margins Credits:
Managing Editor: Rebecca Smith
Managing Producer: Aaron Hay
Associate Producer: Katie Quinn
Digital Producer: Mark Johnson
Transcription of the episode is as follows:
Moana Lutey: So, you know, there were people that were put in hotels out on the west side and given PO boxes for – I think it was six months for free. But if they didn't go in and update their addresses, and a number of them kept moving. So, I have family – I'm from Lahaina – that got moved from one hotel room to the next, or FEMA got them a more long term rental in Kihei or upcountry or wherever it was. We just couldn't track them because in a two month period, maybe they moved six times.
[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]
Eric Fey: All right, everybody. Welcome to another exciting episode of High Turnout Wide Margins. I'm Eric Fey, Director of Elections in St. Louis County, Missouri, with my co-host –
Brianna Lennon: Brianna Lennon, I'm the County Clerk in Boone County, Missouri.
Eric Fey: and our guest today is – Moana, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?
Moana Lutey: I'm Moana Lutey. I'm the County Clerk for the county of Maui.
Eric Fey: So, we want to definitely learn more and hear more about Maui and Hawaii, but first, why don't you tell us a little bit about how you came to be in your current position?
Moana Lutey: Well, we're appointed as Clerk and Deputy Clerk from, the council chair does the appointment, and then the body, by majority vote, confirms us. So, we were appointed and confirmed in 2023, January 2. Well that's when it started. We actually had a second confirmation hearing about a, close to a month later, and prior to that, I was chief legal counsel to the county of Maui under the prior mayor.
Brianna Lennon: Have you always wanted to work in government, or did you just kind of fall into it?
Laughter
Moana Lutey: I've been a government employee for almost 30 years, so I started as a Deputy Prosecuting Attorney, and then I moved over to handle Civil Defense litigation for the county in 1999, and I did that primarily for police, but I also handled catastrophic injury tort cases until I became the county clerk. So, this is a bit different.
Eric Fey: So, I'm curious, were you looking for a change, and did you know the full realm of duties and responsibilities of county clerk when you jumped into that?
Moana Lutey: Well, when I was in-corporation counsel, I would handle challenges, legal challenges that were filed during that time, so I was familiar with the work. I wasn't really looking for a new position. It's just, you know, my appointment as corporation counsel ended with the mayor's term. So, on January, 2, 2023, at noon, that was done. And so, I, you know, called the council chair and just asked if they were looking for clerks, and they were. So, we just moved over, and honestly, it's just been a really great transition. I miss the work of being a litigation attorney, but I don't miss the stress.
Eric Fey: Can you tell us a little bit about how Hawaii is organized in terms of its counties and what the duties of the county clerk are in Hawaii?
Moana Lutey: Sure. So, there are four counties in our state, and Maui is unique in that we have three islands that make up our county. And so, we have Maui, which is the main island, and then we have Molokai and lanai, and I would say, you know, from Lahaina Harbor – when that existed – it would be about maybe a 45 minute boat ride, if that existed, to each of those islands. Molokai used to have a commuter boat, but that ended maybe about six years ago or so. So, really it's by – you have to fly there. But the other counties, like the Big Island, Kauai and Oahu city and county. They are single islands. The Big Island, as you'd imagine, is the largest size wise in our state. So, they have a lot of technical challenges just covering that amount of land, whereas we have to deal with water in between each of our islands. And we run elections, and we also run county council meetings – those are our primary duties.
Brianna Lennon: How many – because I know every state varies on when major elections are or just if they have ongoing ones. We always have an April election in Missouri, but then it's dependent on whether it's an even year – how often are you all running elections?
Moana Lutey: We run elections every even year, and we only do a primary and a general. So, our primaries are in August and our generals are in November. So, this next election that we'll have will be for the mayor's position and all the county council positions, and I'm not sure if we have some state seats, we might, but the, you know, other than that, we don't, unless there's some reason to – in other words, if someone resigns or dies on our council, then we're required to have a special election.
Eric Fey: And I know in recent years, Hawaii has moved to a – for want of a better term – an all mail election model, and I don't know if that, if that's 100% accurate, but can you explain in generalities, if that is correct, and how that works in Hawaii?
Moana Lutey: Sure. So, we became a vote by mail state in 2020, and it's sort of deceiving, in a sense, because we are – we're supposed to be vote by mail exclusively, but the law requires us to have a voter service center open, and so we need to have at least one. But because of Maui County having three islands in our county, we opened one on each of the other islands. So, Lanai and Molokai, and then we had two on Maui in this last election – that was our second round of vote by mail.
And the theory behind it is supposed to be when voters need assistance that they would come to the Voter Service Center, but part of the unfortunate aspect of the timing of the law passing to be a vote by mail state is that people thought it was COVID-related, and so, they thought, “That's why, well, this year we're going to get it by mail, but in the future, we're still going to show up in person.” So, there's a lot of education that we've been trying to do and getting people accustomed to voting by mail, and I'll tell you that prior to us actually switching to a vote by mail scheme, it was far more common for us to have people voting by absentee ballot than it was for people coming in, but you still have the hardcore, you know, vote in person type people, and we get a lot of complaints by a number of those people over early voting. They disagree with early voting and think we should just be doing it on one day, but the reality of that is, is that we do not have the manpower to accommodate a vote by mail – I mean, I'm sorry, a Voter Service Center only model. It just, it doesn't work because we no longer have precincts. So, whereas you might have known how many people would show up in, like, Kihei or Lahaina, anyone can come to Wailuku in our county and vote. So, it's just, it's not possible for us to expand that. We had a lot of requests to expand it because on the last day, on actual Election Day, it gets packed. It's just, it's hard, and then, you know, people are upset because it's hot here, and it's a long wait and so forth, but we're open, you know, 10 days in advance, minimum.
Brianna Lennon: What kind of turnout do you have? Mostly in – have there been, is there a reason why you only have the two elections, you don't have off year elections or anything like that? Because – sorry, the question is kind of all over the place because we keep getting a lot of questions about, “Well, if we consolidated elections, we'd get better turnout,” and you have consolidated elections – and I just want to know more about that.
Moana Lutey: So, we had about 115,000 registered voters in the last general election, which was last November, and we had about a 56% turnout. I still think I can't tell you the exact numbers, but the majority of people voted by mail.
One of the issues that we dealt with that nobody else, I'm sure had to deal with, is with the Lahaina fires – there's a huge displacement of that entire community, and so, we worked with the state in trying to locate those individuals to make sure that they could vote because it – they basically be’d voting as though they were, like, absentee voters. We would use their burn zone address as their permanent address, but it, you know, when you're – everything you've owned is burned to the ground and you don't have a job, the election really was not a priority. So, when we did our mail outs, we got a lot of envelopes back because, by law, they can't be forwarded to any forwarding address. So, that was a huge problem for us. I think our turnout probably would have been better if we'd had maybe another year to let things settle a bit more and get people more firmly situated. But just as an example, you know, there were people that were put in hotels out on the west side and given PO boxes for – I think it was six months for free, but if they didn't go in and update their addresses – and a number of them kept moving. So, I have family – I'm from Lahaina – that got moved from one hotel room to the next, or FEMA got them a more long term rental in Kihei or upcountry, or wherever it was. We just couldn't track them because in a two month period, maybe they moved six times. So, that was a really huge difficulty that we had during this last election, and we're hoping to do a lot more outreach coming into the next election, and hopefully update addresses so that we can reach people.
Eric Fey: So Moana, do you want to – if you don't mind? I think most mainlanders heard about the fire in your county, but maybe, if you wouldn't mind going into a little more detail of the effect it had on not just the election, but just your community and the operation of government and so forth.
Moana Lutey: Yeah, it was crazy. So, in August of 2023 – August 8, the entire town…
I need a minute.
My entire hometown burned up, and it's a generational issue for me because it wasn't just where I grew up, but my mom, my grandma, my great grandparents – where there's about six generations of us from Lahaina.
We just lost everything.
So, it was a really hard time. It still is. We lost 2,200 homes, and so many people were displaced, I don't know how many businesses. There were about 102 people that died in that fire, but because it's my hometown, it was critically important to me that we try and get as many people's voices heard as possible.
Yeah, it was hard.
We were just getting so, you know, like people talk about COOPs [continuity of operations plans] as though they're all encompassing, it was not. In this case, there was nothing we could do to even access the west side because it's – basically our island shaped like a strange body with a head and the west sides on the head. But to get in and out, there's only two access ways – the main access way, which is Honoapiʻilani Highway, or Highway 30, or Kahakuloa [indecipherable], which is rarely used for like regular ingress or egress because it's very narrow and it's occupied. That area is very small. There's families that have lived there for generations. I have family in there, so it's not a way to access it, and the entire town was closed off. The National Guard came in and closed off both roadways, so that only the emergency vehicles could get in and secured the town. And the other part of it is that that area was toxic from everything that had burned – either vehicles and just all kinds of things. It was just, you couldn't go in there and reasonably believe that you're coming out without some type of lung damage, in other words. So, we couldn't get there. Boats were taking, like, supplies to families out there. So, I had family getting food that way, but it wasn't, it took a while for everyone to sort of pull it together because the harbor was gone, and there's only one harbor on that side.
So, it's just – we were hoping to do mobile voting to get to the hotels that house some of the survivors, but that just never, it didn't happen. So, we ended up trying to compete with FEMA for the Lahaina Civic Center because all the other buildings were gone, like, the grade school, the senior center – anywhere that could have worked as a voting place. But the others, like my high school, Lahainaluna and Lahaina Intermediate – they existed. They still do, but you'd have to drive up through the burn zone to get there. So, it wasn't an option. There's just no way. But we ended up getting Lahaina Civic Center.
[High Turnout Wide Margins Mid-break]
Brianna Lennon: To touch on, like, the interconnectedness of elections to the rest of the community, I mean, like, yeah, the COOP planning and all of that is important because we want to make sure everybody's voices are heard, but, like, that's why – that community aspect is why we want to make sure people's voices are heard, and I – without, I don't want to turn everything into this because it's, I know, a very heavy conversation, but you had mentioned that you didn't have to – since you weren't in the legal office – there were things that you didn't have to deal with, but you know what else ended up falling kind of on you to help the county get through that time?
Moana Lutey: I think that for us, a lot of it was really – so, to back up a little bit. A lot of the people that were displaced were having difficulty getting their insurance companies to provide them with compensation for what they had lost, and part of the reason for that is that they had no driver's license or really any documents that they could hold in their hands, saying, “Look, I live there. This is my address, and I'm entitled to some form of compensation.” And so, we were providing certificates of voting registration so that we could show that, you know, you had an address, it is in the burn zone, and, you know, this is where you have voted previously, and so we did those. We did many, many of those. I'm not even sure how many, and we just waived costs for those – anyone that came in, we would give it to them for free. Just to try and help them in that process of getting just their insurance, honestly at that point. But, at the same time, we're asking them to update their information with us, but it was just – so there was so much movement going on. It's just really hard to explain, and unless you've been through something like this, where like – trying to track humans down was really difficult, but also for the first at least two full weeks, maybe longer, there was absolutely no phone lines, no way of getting in touch with anybody because all that had burned. So, one of – I think it was Starlink, but it might have been a different company – they came out and put towers out on the west side, and so that way we were able to communicate by cell. But otherwise, people were waiting for times when the National Guard would open the road to allow them to come out to the main, the central part of the island, and they would physically come in and we would give them certificates. So, there were a lot of people that I knew coming in, and it was good to see them honestly. You see that they were okay.
Eric Fey: Can you discuss a little bit the challenges that persist to this day? I mean, especially as they relate to elections. You said, you know, so many people were displaced. Is that still a challenge – getting people's voter registrations up to date and getting them information on how to access elections?
Moana Lutey: Oh, yeah, that's been difficult. So, we hired a PIO [Public Information Officer], who I used to work with under a different mayor, maybe – gosh, I don't know how many mayors ago, that was maybe four. So, he's come on. He's updated our Facebook page. He's got Instagram going, but he comes from a local TV station here. That's his background. So, he's been able to get out and start setting all those things up. He's been doing meetings with a lot of the media trying to get everyone geared up for the next round of elections, and we'll do a signature drive.
One of the problems that we experienced – and I don't know if this is unique to us, but it was in this circumstance – is we were getting return identification envelopes back that, you know, probably have ballots in them, but we don't refer to them that way because we don't open them. We just know their envelopes and the signatures weren't matching, and so, part of our process here because of all the issues over displacement and so forth, is all of us in my office – including me, would call people and just say, “Hey, look, you know, your ballot has an issue. Can you come in and cure it? Or you can do an affidavit to cure” and tell them how to find it, and in a number of those instances, we discovered that these are fire victims who have moved multiple times, never got their ballots, did not vote that and because the last election was federal, we were able to turn those over to the FBI, and that's an active investigation now for, I think, we gave him 16, but I'm sure there's far more. It's just, we know those for sure were not signed by the actual voter because we talked to them.
Eric Fey: Does all the mail in Hawaii go to one processing center and then back out? I mean, I know that's something some folks have kind of complained about on the mainland, is that all your mail doesn't stay local. It goes to some processing center, could be another state, and then gets shipped back. Does it work similar to that in your case?
Moana Lutey: It does. So, yeah, anything that's coming to Maui, it goes to the city and county of Honolulu, and then it's dispersed from there to us, but Wailuku is our main post office, and then there is a post office that survived in Lahaina – one burned, one survived, and the one that survived is the one that offered the PO boxes, and, you know, for six months and anyhow. But the problem with that is we have two zip codes in Lahaina for reasons I'll never understand. One is 96761, which was mine growing up my entire life, and the other is 96767. And so, anything that was addressed to “67,” for some reason, was coming back to us, and I will never understand why that was. We spoke to the post office multiple times, but a number of those people ended up having to come in and vote in person because we kept getting their return identification envelopes returned, and couldn't seem to figure out how to get it to them. But I think – absent the fires and all of that, it would have worked. It's just with the temporary boxes, it was a problem.
Brianna Lennon: On that note, I mean, looking toward – we're a ways away from midterm elections, but, you know, we're all thinking two elections past the one we're doing anyway. What are your challenges that you're trying to get set up now? Or are you still just kind of focused on finishing out the year now?
Moana Lutey: So, right now what we're really trying to do is plan out our signature drives, so that we can get those updated. We've been updating our Agilis. I hired someone specifically to handle Agilis, and we have another woman here that helped in the last round. So, there's a lot of just more of that behind the scenes type of planning, and then we'll go public facing with the signature drives and so forth, probably around March and April of next year, after candidate filing closes. So, you know, hopefully we're able to get more bodies on board quickly, you know, training is always an issue, and it's, you know, it's always very busy here during a mayoral election. We typically end up with many, many candidates for that seat, including the incumbent. So, it gets busy and it gets a little wild.
Brianna Lennon: I really wanted to ask real quick though the signature drive process. So, what does the public facing side of that look like? Because I think, especially in places that are doing signature verification that I have talked to before, for the most part, it seems like, “Well, if the voter gives us a signature, then that's fine. We'll hold on to that,” but they aren't necessarily proactively going out and trying to get updated signatures. So, can you talk a little bit about what that process looks like and why it's important?
Moana Lutey: Sure. So, it was done a few years ago – maybe four years ago, and, you know, if you've ever – we all take signature verification classes. Anyone here that needs to manually look at them, we take the class that's taught by someone who teaches statewide. And it's really not a bunch of you know hocus pocus, it's pretty darn easy to spot signatures that don't match. But our goal is to get out there and have people update because over time, your signatures change, and, in our state, there was a law that allows us to account for age and so forth. You can see like, “maybe the E looks similar, but it's a little more jerky. Well, that could be age and so forth,” but our goal is to get out publicly and have people come in and sign again, so that we can update our programs and so forth. That way, we're not calling them after the election and saying, “We have a signature verification issue. Can you come in and update?”
So, getting ahead of that is important to us for a number of reasons, but mostly so that we can just process as they come, instead of having to go back and backtrack because most people, honestly, when we call them and say, “Look, we have a problem with your signature,” and the results, you know, because we have a curing time of, I think, it's about a week – are like, “The votes already done. I'm not coming in. I'm not going to do it,” and we just would really like to be able to account for everyone's vote that took the time to do it.
Eric Fey: You've been listening to High Turnout Wide Margins, a podcast that explores local elections administration. I'm your host, Eric Fey alongside Brianna Lennon. A big thanks to KBIA and the Election Center for making this podcast possible. Our Managing Editor is Rebecca Smith. Managing Producer is Aaron Hay. Our Associate Producer is Katie Quinn, and our Digital Producer is Mark Johnson. This has been High Turnout Wide Margins. Thanks for listening.
