Ditch exit polls
In the electoral process, the United States has some of the most bizarre problems, one of which is the exit poll.
You should vote your conscience, but if your preferred candidate is behind, many only want to vote for who is ahead simply because they don’t want to waste their vote. What we have is a personality contest considerably more ridiculous than a junior high school student body election could ever be. We shouldn’t know who is ahead or behind, only what percent of the votes have been tallied.
I recall some student body elections that make our national elections look like a very badly scripted attempt at comedy. If the concept of ranked choice voting scares some, this might terrify them even more.
Then there’s the monetary aspect. What gets some candidates elected is having a big corporation behind them, especially after that highly questionable Citizens United thing. New challengers to entrenched incumbents with millions have to beg for grassroots donations, and after a while it gets annoying being swamped by candidates and causes begging for money.
The candidates should be allocated a certain amount, and if they can’t run an election on that then it should be an indication that they wouldn’t do any better at running a political entity, the job for which they are applying.
Dave Kisor
Pahoa
Test all visitors
If Hawaii wants to restart the tourism industry and a more normal mode of existence, we need to do it intelligently, which means safely.
We are blessed that we have so few cases of COVID-19 in our islands. The virus does not move by itself. We should absolutely not be allowing any tourists at all into the state unless they have been tested. The last two cases have come from tourists. It would be smart to simply test all people who want to come instead of having the burden of a two-week quarantine. Quarantines can be easily broken as they are now administered. If visitors and tourists were required to enter the state “clean” of coronavirus, our problem would be solved.
All visitors arriving by air should be tested before they get on the flight to Hawaii. Visitors arriving by sea should be tested before disembarking or should be “offered” a supervised quarantine or ankle bracelet until they can be tested.
As in the rest of the world, the solution to controlling and eliminating the virus in our society depends on rapid and accurate testing that is easily available for free to all people in the population. Do I need to repeat that?
What is the holdup? Why are we letting a trickle of potentially infectious visitors enter the state? It cannot be much of a help for the economy when, before the pandemic, 30,000 people arrived a day. Rather, it is hurting the economy by keeping it shut down because of the uncertainty that untested visitors bring.
The solution is outlined above and would allow levels of tourism to safely rise. It would also provide security for the people of this state.
Joshua Yang
Paauilo