Scott and Scotty: The End of an Era

The Elections Commission has a new Chair

Yesterday after doing interviews behind closed doors in Executive Session, the Elections Commission (EC) announced that Michael Curtis will replace Scotty Anderson as the EC Chair.

It would have been nice to have been privy to the interviews, or at the minimum have access to the list of candidates who applied, but transparency is Enemy #1 of the Office of Elections. A public records request for a list of the EC Chair candidates was denied.

The OE even had the nerve to prematurely remove the EC Chair vacancy announcement from their website, which promptly reappeared after I sent them an email asking why it was gone. (They did not respond to the email, in case you were wondering).

So who is Michael Curtis?

Curtis is an EC member representing Kaua’i. He was first appointed in 2018 by the House Minority Leader, so we know he’s not a Democrat. Curtis has been active locally, having served on the Kaua’i Board of Realtors, member of Kaua’i Chamber of Commerce, and Chair of the Kaua’i Board of Ethics.

In the April 1 2022 EC meeting, Curtis made a motion to initiate an “investigation into the 2020 Hawaii Election operations of each County’s Office of Elections,” which, not surprisingly, did not carry.

So we know he has doubts about our elections. Coconut wireless reports that he is a Trump hater, and skeptical of Seth Keshel’s Hawai’i analysis of census and voter roll registration analysis that gives Hawai’i a conservative estimate of 100,000 “excess” votes for Biden in the 2020 election. I have not yet reached out to Curtis for confirmation.

Will he be supportive of grassroots efforts to obtain a sliver of transparency from the OE? Will he shoot us down, like the previous Chair, when we ask questions and request investigations into data discrepancies, Chain of Custody issues, and downright lawbreaking?

I sure hope not. Time will tell.

For today, at least we can celebrate the end of an era of Scott and Scotty: Scott, who blatantly breaks election laws, and his partner in crime Snarky Scotty, who ran inference for him for the past eight years.

Buh-bye!