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When every vote really does count: It was a big black eye for Hawaii on Saturday when voter turnout hit a historic low of just 32.1%. But as the final election results came in Sunday morning there were two legislatives races that appeared close to triggering an automatic recount.

required a mandatory recount of election votes and ballot measures when the margin of victory is equal to or less than 100 or one-quarter of 1% of the votes cast, whichever is greater.  Rep. Sonny Ganaden trailed Democratic challenger Shirley Ann Templo by a mere 46 votes in House District 30 in the Kalihi area on Oahu. And Rep. Cedric Gates led former Rep. Stacelynn Eli by just 84 votes for the Senate District 22 seat out on Oahu’s West Side.

But there will be no recounts. That’s because a bill approved at the Hawaii Legislature amended the recount law to require that mandatory recounts occur only when the difference in votes cast is equal to or less than 100 votes or one-quarter of 1% of the total number of votes cast for the contest, “whichever is lesser.

What’s important in crunching the numbers is to include the blank and over votes in the total.

For District 30, approximately 175 votes were left blank and five were “over” votes, meaning those voters screwed up some part of their ballot such as by voting for more than one candidate in a specific race. In District 22, there were 129 blank votes and two over votes.

Hawaii’s elections guru Scott Nago did the math and concluded that, in order to trigger the recount, the Ganaden-Templo would have to be just four votes apart — that is, by a margin of 0.25%. Meantime, the Gates-Eli match would have to have been just 10 votes apart — 0.25% of the total.

The recount law was changed at the request of the Office of Elections, which said in its testimony that since the implementation of automatic recounts there have been 11 recounts triggered, most of them in the primaries.

“This was due in part to the size of some single-party primary contest being so small that the 100 vote provision triggered a recount even though the vote difference came nowhere close to meeting the alternate trigger of a vote difference of one-quarter of 1% of the total number of votes cast for the contest or less,” earlier this year.

The 2024 was supported by the League of Women Voters of Hawaii and received only one vote in opposition in the full Legislature — from Republican Sen. Brenton Awa.

Nago tells The Blog no races from Saturday’s primary led to recounts.

North Shore wipeout: Speaking of elections, the Democratic primary for Senate District 23 was expected by many politicos to see Clayton Hee on his way back into elected office. He previously held the same seat from 1984 to 1988 and from 2004 to 2014 as well as stints in the Hawaii House of Representatives and on the Office of Hawaiian Affairs Board of Trustees.

Nope. Ben Shafer won the race in a landslide and now faces incumbent GOP Sen. Brenton Awa for the district that runs from Oahu’s North Shore down into Kaneohe.

It proved a costly loss for Hee. According to his most recent , he finished $78,419 in the red. And more that half of the nearly $200,000 he raised for his race came from his own pocket via loans.

Notable donors in the waning days of Hee’s campaign included his would-be colleagues in the Senate Michelle Kidani, Donna Kim and Jarrett Keohokalole, attorneys Jim Wright and Mitchell Imanaka, Ben and Vicky Cayetano and the ILWU Local 142 and United Food & Commercial Workers Union Local 48.

The Blog noticed that Hee also spent $93,000 to run political advertisements on Hawaii News Now and its affiliates and another $19,000 to produce the ads.

The garden path: Also speaking of elections, the promotional flier pictured below turned up in The Blog’s inbox Monday, and from a reliable source.

But why would Senate President Ron Kouchi hold a pricey gathering at The Pacific Club for Kauai Mayor Derek Kawakami, who is not on the ballot this year and is termed out in 2026?

Inquiries with the Senate communications office were not returned, but Kouchi and Kawakami are popular Democrats on the Garden Island.

The talk in political circles is that Kawakami could have his eye on a future office — like Kouchi’s, if Kouchi chooses not to run again in 2026 — or maybe governor or LG.

On a related note, Kouchi was elected as a board member of the NCSL Foundation for State Legislatures during the National Conference of State Legislatures’ 2024 Legislative Summit in Louisville, Kentucky, last week.