Colleen Hanubasa sues to extend polling in Hawaii. Desperately? …Perhaps desperately.

It’s Blue-on-Blue electoral lawfare in Hawaii, so sit back and enjoy:

The suit [filed by Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, D] will ask the five justices for a restraining order to delay Friday’s vote because the people in the Puna district need more time.”People are definitely without water, definitely without electricity and it’s going to be a while,” she said.

Elections officials decided immediately after the storm to cancel walk-in voting at two polling places because residents and workers could not access the sites. Those are the only places where people can vote on Friday. Hanabusa said other residents who could not get to their polling places should also be allowed to participate in the second-chance vote and election officials aren’t being fair to them.

…and that last sentence is the key point, really. Hanabusa trails kinda-incumbent Senator Brian Schatz by about 1,700 votes. Making that up in the Puna voting district (which has about 8,000 or so registered voters) is a kind of a tall order. Making that up, say, statewide, is not.  Mind you, sitting lame-duck Governor Neil Abercrombie – who got trounced in his own primary – is probably not going to be helpful when it comes to doing more than the bare minimum necessary to assure voting.  After all, arguably it was his appointment of Schatz over Hanabusa to the US Senate in the first place that got him into this mess…

Moe Lane

PS: Yeah, it’s a really mixed-up situation in Hawaii right now. Especially if Republican Duke Aiona wins the gubernatorial election.