HONOLULU (KHON2) — Primary election day is on Saturday. Time is running out, but there’s still time for you to make your vote count.
Volunteers are hard at work getting your ballots ready to be counted for Saturday’s primary election.
“We’ve been processing since last week Tuesday, so it’s basically the same thing we’ve been doing,” said Scott Nago of the State Elections Office.
Election officials said as of yesterday, they’ve received about 213,000 ballots statewide. That’s just 29 percent of the 727,000 ballots they sent out.
“Voters have to have a reason to vote, ” said Nago. “Causes. So it’s not simply voting and having a ballot placed in front of them leads people to vote.”
Election officials estimate only 1 percent of the votes are walk-ins.
“They should — it’s our civic duty and it matters.” said Jan Remillard, Aina Haina resident
At Honolulu Hale, KHON2 saw just few walk-in voters. For the most part, the voting area was empty when we were there.
There was a pretty good amount of people dropping off their ballots either by drive-thru or walking in.
“My son got married, and then I went on a trip and I’m like ‘oh my goodness, I need to drop off my ballot’,” said Remillard. “So lunchtime, filled out my ballot and walked over here.”
Key things to know to ensure your vote counts:
Ballots must be received by 7 p.m. Saturday. So, you cannot drop it off it in the mail. You need to find one of the 55 ballot drop boxes set up across the state and drop it there. Each county’s box is a different color.
Make sure you sign your return envelope.
If you make a mistake, do not use white out. You should just vote in person. There are 10 locations across the state.
If you want to track your ballot, you can log on to the election office website and sign up for alerts.
“It’ll tell you when your ballot has been received, processed and ready for counting, and once that’s done you can download your virtual, I voted sticker.” said Nago.