Hawaii

The nine trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs appear on the statewide ballot, but until 2000 only Native Hawaiians were qualified to vote for them. The state published the two electorates side by side and they are not close: 100,163 OHA registrations against 582,558 state registrations at the 1998 election. A model in which one election has one electorate cannot represent this, and any turnout rate computed for OHA against the state register is wrong by a factor of nearly six for every year from 1980 to 1998.

The main 2026 Proclamation names thirteen state senators; two more seats exist and are proclaimed separately, one per vacancy, because HRS § 17-3 governs vacancies rather than the general-election statutes. The two are not even handled alike: District 19 runs a primary and a general under § 17-3(b)(1), while District 18 under § 17-3(b)(3) has no primary, is nominated by party county committees, and resolves a nonpartisan candidacy by lot. Filing closes June 2 for one and September 4 for the other. A harvester that treats the proclamation as the office inventory is short two seats, and a candidate-filing model with one deadline and one nomination path is wrong for at least one of them.

Hawaii's primary is the second Saturday in August — August 8 in 2026 — and it is the only state in this corpus that does not vote on a Tuesday. Every heuristic that derives an election date from a weekday rule, every calendar that assumes Tuesday when a date is missing, and every scraper that validates a parsed date against an expected weekday fails here. The general election is on the usual Tuesday after the first Monday in November, so the same state disagrees with itself between its two elections.

Hawaii has five counties. Kalawao County exists in the Census geography as FIPS 15005, and it appears in no government listing, has no elected officials, and is administered by the State Department of Health. It has no elections division, and its residents vote through Maui County. So the state's four county clerks administer five counties, and any join that treats county geography as a one-to-one match with county administration silently drops or invents a jurisdiction depending on which direction it runs.

The Census counts zero independent school districts in Hawaii and one dependent unit, Hawaii Public Schools, run as a state agency. Everywhere else in this corpus the school tier is among the largest by count — Washington has 295, Texas over a thousand — and it is elected. Here it is a single statewide body and its board is not on the county ballot at all. A pipeline that expects school districts to nest inside counties finds nothing to nest, and one that treats an empty school tier as missing data will keep looking for a layer that does not exist.

The City and County of Honolulu had 562,606 of the state's 860,868 registered voters at the 2024 general — 65%. The other three counties together hold barely a third, and Kauai at 48,176 is under six percent. With only four administrative units in the entire state, there is no law of large numbers to fall back on: a single clerk's office decides the shape of two-thirds of the data, and any process that samples counties, allocates effort per county, or averages across counties is describing Honolulu with three footnotes.

The statistics page publishes primary turnout from 1959, general turnout from 1959 and OHA turnout from 1980, all in the same layout with the same column headers, and all three carry a different register. The 2024 primary counts 839,618 registered while the 2024 general counts 860,868 — the same year, twenty-one thousand apart, because they were measured at different dates. The OHA series is a different population entirely. Three tables that look identical and are not interchangeable is the easiest way in this corpus to pair a rate with the wrong denominator.

The word county has three different referents here and all three are correct. Hawaii's statutes recognise five. The Office of Elections lists four elections divisions. The Census counts three county governments, classifying the City and County of Honolulu as a municipality because it is consolidated. The Census gap is exactly one and it is exactly Honolulu, which is the same pattern seen in Colorado, Montana, Nevada, California and Alaska — but only Hawaii adds a second, different gap in Kalawao, which is a county with no government rather than a government filed under another name.