Embattled Big Island Clerk Jamae Kawauchi today sent out a memorandum asking Gov. Neil Abercrombie to conduct an independent review of the state’s Office of Elections. She is also requesting that the lieutenant governor oversee the office’s administration for the November general election.

The eight-page document marks the second time Kawauchi has fired back at state elections officials following a searing investigation they publicized last Thursday.

Kawauchi says that she became wary about the Hawaii Office of Elections in September 2011, when she first expressed her concerns about its performance to the state’s Election Commission. Management of elections personnel, communication with staff and conduct of election-day operations were among the concerns she listed.

“It is my sense that although the State of Hawaii Office of Elections has taken no responsibility for the serious mishaps that occurred on Primary Election day, the problems with election related irregularities on election day do in fact relate back to the significant issues that I identified,” she wrote.

In the memo Kawauchi laments the delayed opening of what she has concluded were 14 polling places. (In the report, elections officials said that 13 sites had opened late.)

Kawauchi provides four main reasons for why polling places, particularly those in the west part of the island, opened late: delayed delivery of equipment and supplies to polling places, voting equipment malfunction, failed communications with the control center and missing voter-related information.  

She then goes on to detail her analysis of exactly why those problems occurred. But she says her own investigation has been hampered because the Hawaii Office of Elections took her election record books for its report “without permission and consent and without prior notice.”

— Alia Wong