- Update: Official results are in. Bernie Sanders has won Hawaii with 69.8 percent of the vote. Hillary Clinton received 30 percent. He won a total of 104 delegates out of a possible 142.
Hawaii results are beginning to roll in and it’s looking good for Bernie Sanders. On Hawaii’s Big Island, Jarrod Burks shared an unofficial tally of votes from District Five. Bernie Sanders received a total of 806 votes while Clinton received only 255 votes.
Unlike Washington and Alaska, mainstream media news outlets are silent on Hawaii results. MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News have yet to report any results from the Aloha state, despite several results posted online hours ago.
More recently, Washington state finally reported all 72 precincts and the final tally has Bernie Sanders at 72.1 percent and Clinton at 27.1 percent. Alaska’s final total was even better for Sanders, with the Vermont senator winning 81.6 percent of the total vote. If he had won just 3.5 percent more votes, he would have rendered Clinton nonviable and won all 16 of the state’s delegates.
In Maui, Twitter user David Fry reported a landslide victory for Bernie Sanders with record turnouts.
#HICaucus results from upcountry Maui. Haiku (13-2) B:898 H:108, Paia (13-1) B:143 H:27. Record turnout, landslide for Bernie. #Hawaii #Maui
— David Fry (@davidkfry) March 27, 2016
Some voters in Hawaii experienced difficulty in getting access to their caucus locations, or finding them closed. Apparently, polls were supposed to be open until 6 p.m., but many closed earlier than that as the lines trickled off. Hawaii rules evidently dictate that polling locations may close if voters do not show up for 30 minutes.
According to the Honolulu Star Advisor , Democratic Party of Hawaii chairwoman Stephanie Ohigashi was aware of the problems but did not suggest any action would be taken. Indeed, she seemed to brush off these concerns when interviewed by local media.
“I’ve been informed that when they got there it was closed, and that could happen at smaller precincts. These are members of the party. They know what they’re doing. They’ve come to vote.”
Just before 8 p.m. local time (2 a.m. EDT) the Democratic Party of Hawaii announced on its Facebook page that officials had begun to count the votes.
The page was awash with angry voters with stories of being turned away at the polls by volunteers who had closed locations. The problem affected both Clinton and Sanders supporters. And in one case, a voter wrote about potential vote tampering by a precinct captain supporting Bernie Sanders.
“There was no clear distinction of when the polls were closing. This is an outrage. We had people still coming in to vote in district 34/35 and were being turned away because ‘we closed about five minutes ago, sealed the ballots and sent them away!’”
Another voter told of potential election fraud at a Kailua location with a precinct captain that favored Bernie Sanders.
“Precinct presidents were not following the rules…president for 2nd precinct at Kailua Elementary joked about only counting Bernie Sanders ballots; handed out ballots without checking to see if the people getting the ballots were checked in and registered, then he collected the ballots open-faced, in his hand, no ballot box anywhere to be found, no way to check that the person didn’t fill out more than one ballot. There is no way that the process was secure.”
Another voter decried the apparent rampant chaos witnessed at several locations throughout the island state.
“Democratic Party of Hawaii, my sister and her boyfriend showed up to their meeting location in Waikiki at 3:45 p.m. and were turned away. They informed me there were around a hundred other voters who were also turned away by rude volunteers. Why weren’t closing times posted anywhere? There are many frustrated Democrats in Hawaii who want answers.”
Earlier in the day in Washington state, a caucus goer witnessed a Precinct Committee Officer attempting to leave the polling location with ballots in an unsealed envelope.
“She was asking people for the fastest way to the parking lot, walking fast.”
The ballot envelope was returned and the PCO resigned her position and left.
Official results may not be reported until the wee hours of Easter Sunday, until then, Hawaii voters, and the rest of the country, wait to find out if Bernie Sanders made a clean sweep on Saturday.
[Photo by Marco Garcia/AP Images]