Mayoral Runoff

Man, how close was Mayor Mufi Hannemann to avoiding a runoff in the November general election? All he needed was 50% of the vote +1 and he ended up with something like 49.3%. I know that Mufi was campaigning hard to get his supporters to vote during the primary this past Saturday as I attended several of his functions so he must be really disappointed.

The thing is that Mufi probably has the mayoral race all sewn up but now has to spend another 2 months campaigning for an inevitable result. City Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi was a distant 2nd with about 30% of the vote, which is actually pretty impressive considering she entered the race very late.

But I know Mufi really wanted to avoid the general election and just wanted to concentrate on going back to doing his job. You have to blame the low turnout for these results. Only 35% of voters went to the polls. That is so pathetic. I'm not a big political guy by any means. I don't watch CNN regularly but I do try to keep on top of the main issues whenever possible. But I definitely take advantage of my ability to vote.

I think a lot of people in this country take this privilege for granted. We have to consider ourselves very lucky to have a say in who gets to be our political leaders and that's something I appreciate a lot. People always complain about who's in the White House or who's running the State of Hawaii but you know what? Chances are these people never got out there to vote so they shouldn't say anything. I mean come on...35%? That's just plain sad and screams of the sometimes typical apathy of the people of Hawaii.

Granted, I don't think that the government did a good job of informing the public that 9/20 was the day of the primary election either. If I hadn't attended the mayoral support functions, there's a chance I wouldn't have known about it. I think if the public was better educated about the primary election, this wouldn't have happened and there would've been a bigger turnout at the polls.

Oh well....I guess we can all look forward to another 2 months of campaigning...it should be interesting as I think Ann Kobayashi (a very strong supporter of the Korean community as is Mayor Hannemann) is a great person and very qualified as well.