Hawaii has had Democratic governors since 1962, and near one party control of its legislature for most of that time.   As one would expect when one party is unchallenged for so long, the Democrats became corrupt and arrogant, and began to cut corners to hang on to power.

In 1998, the Republican mayor of Maui, Linda Lingle*, ran for governor and came very close to winning.  In 2002, she won and is now trying to institute reforms there.   John Fund's chapter on Hawaii, "Tropical Tammany", in his book, Stealing Elections, persuades me that Lingle may have won in 1998, too.

There were many, many irregularities in the 1998 election, among them reports of vote buying, spikes in absentee ballots in a few areas, dead people voting, electioneering at the polls, ballot boxes disappearing, abuses in elderly care homes, and failures in election software**.   One that will be of interest to those following Washington's race for governor was the number of non-citizens who voted — most of them, as far as one can tell, for Lingle's opponent, Benjamin Cayetano.

In Districts 29, 30 and 31, impoverished areas of Oahu where many noncitizens reside, there was an unusual voting pattern.  In one of the districts, around a thousand people voted by absentee ballot on the same day, and returned their ballots by mail in unison two weeks later.  Many of these people lived in a six-block area, with some houses housing up to ten residents with five different family names.

This drew the attention of the Voting Integrity Project, which launched a serious investigation of the area and the general question of non-citizens voting.

VIP investigators also uncovered a number of confirmed noncitizens and suspected noncitizens who voted in [Romy] Cachola's district.  That led them to encourage the Honolulu city clerk, Genny Wong, to figure out a way to determine if more noncitizens were voting throughout the state.  The federal Immigration and Naturalization Service, run by the Clinton administration, refused to help in the assessment.  But that did not deter Wong and her staff, who independently cross-referenced names on the state's registered voter rolls with the citizenship records in the state's identification database, and determined that 543 registered voters on Oahu may have been or still are improperly or illegally registered to vote.

Wong sent out letters to those suspected 543 alien registered voters asking for proof of citizenship.  More than a hundred people responded shortly after Wong's inquiry, with about half providing proof and the other half asking that their names be removed from the voter registration rolls.

This was the city's first extensive attempt to find out who may be illegally registered in Hawaii, and it is important to note that the city checked only those who had state identifications (not driver's licenses), a small part of the population in Hawaii.  City officials said that a small number of neighbor islanders who held who held state identifications also were listed as noncitizens and would be issued letters.

Let's summarize: VIP and Genny Wong checked a small fraction of Hawaii's voters and found a significant number of non-citizens who admitted that they were on the rolls illegally.  No one should be surprised if many of those in the 543 who did not reply to Wong's letter were also non-citizens.

Let's suppose that Wong checked 10 percent of Hawaii's voters, which seems high to me, and that just half of the 543 were non-citizens, which seems low to me.  With those very conservative assumptions, we still would estimate that nearly 3,000 non-citizens were on the rolls in Hawaii.  We don't know how many voted, although the strange patterns in Cachola's district, and elsewhere, suggest many may have.  (A few may have voted in return for cash; Cachola had a very interesting pattern of expenditures in the election, with many unexplained small cash payments to individuals.)

Now let's try to extrapolate those numbers to Washington.  Let me say immediately that I understand that I am now asking you to take a jump in the argument.  I am doing that because I want to show that it is plausible that illegal votes from non-citizens provided Christine Gregoire's 129 vote margin, not that it happened, but that it is reasonable to believe that it may have.  It is a question, in other words, that deserves investigation.

About 7 percent of Hawaii's roughly 1.2 million residents are non-citizens.  About 6 percent of Washington's roughly 6 million residents are non-citizens, so Washington has more than 4 times as many non-citizens.  If, in our last election, nearly 12,000 citizens were on the voting rolls here and just 1 in 10 voted, then 1,200 voted.  Most non-citizens in Washington state are Hispanics who tend to vote Democratic by about 2 to 1, at least those Hispanics who have not been in United States for long.  Most other immigrant groups have similar voting patterns.  This set of very conservative assumptions leads me to conclude that almost certainly Christine Gregoire gained a minimum of 400 votes, net, from non-citizens.  So I do believe this question deserves investigation.

Unfortunately, the Hawaii case also shows why the question of how many non-citizens voted here will probably not be investigated.  Jon Yoshimura, then head of the the Honolulu city council, said that there was no great reason to prosecute non-citizens who had voted.  The local media carried many accounts defending voting by non-citizens, including one from state representative Dennis Arakaki, who argued that Hawaii's non-citizens are often more interested in voting than its citizens.  As far as I can tell, none of the major news organizations in Hawaii made any significant attempt to follow up on what VIP and Genny Wong had learned.

Were there even any prosecutions?  Fund does not mention any.

Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.

(*Those who think our system is closed to talent may want to look at Lingle's career.  If I were picking the candidate most likely to win the governorship of Hawaii, I don't think it would occur to me to look for a Jewish Republican divorcee from Saint Louis.  Lingle is all of those things and won anyway.

**The firm that had problems with its election software was ES&S, the same one that was associated with some odd results here in our last election.)