MIN CHARTER 2019-01-25 (2018-2020)

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Hawaii County Charter Commission -7 January 25, 2019 have been allowed to get so large when there are so many already approved properties on the list for acquisition. I mean it is almost as if they were created to be ripe for the picking when somebody needed to balance a budget. It doesn't make any sense to me at all. I would like to ask this Commission to please keep these funds in place at two percent, please hire somebody to administer these funds, and do not take these funds and put them in the emergency fund. That is not the place for it as it has been stated, there is a fund for that, it just needs to be funded. Thank you for listening. CHR. ADAMS: Thank you. If 1 could ask Elizabeth Weatherford please to come forward. Mr. Weatherford. JAMES WEATHERFORD: Communication No. 15, commenting. MR. WEATHERFORD: Yes, thank you. Good morning. My name is James Weatherford. I reside in Pahoa on the other side of the island. Had a beautiful 80 mile drive over here this morning. I want to talk to you today, to change the topic during my testimony a little. I want to address Communication No. 15 on your agenda which as I understand you will be, you are open to discuss any of the Articles in the Charter, recently I submitted through the Charter's website, a proposal to amend the Hawaii County Charter, Section 13-27. That is the part of the Charter that deals with how we conduct our elections. Specifically the amendment that we have proposed would apply to the election of the Mayor, the Prosecuting Attorney, and all of the Council members and this is something called ranked choice voting. Much of the information that I have provided and that I would encourage you to pursue if you would like to know more, can be found at that website of an organization called Fair Vote.org, fairvote.org. What we submitted, there are a couple of options, you can have a general statement or something more explicit and that can be talked about further. With rank choice voting, what voters do is they rank as many candidates as they want in order of choice. Candidates do best when they attract a core of first choice support, but also reach out to other what they think may be supporters of other candidates to say "well, if you can't put me first, at least put me second" and in the counting of votes, very briefly, if the person who has 30 percent or a small number of first rank votes doesn't make it, the people that voted for him first, they have put another candidate second, what they have to say, still counts. So it allows you to rank your candidate and realistically you can also put candidates first, and you can also put a particular candidate last. And mathematically that puts that person at a very bad position. So rank choice voting has been implemented in several local jurisdictions around this Country and more recently the State of Maine has implemented rank choice voting. Some of the highlights of some effects they have seen when rank choice voting has been used is that it mitigates what we call the spoiler effect, one candidate that is only pulling votes away from another because everybody still counts. We have seen compared to primary elections, where rank choice voting was used, we have seen increased voter turnout. People Page 30