Two Republican primary races in West Oahu ended in exact ties this week after election officials finished processing a batch of cured mail ballots, setting up a rare drawing at the Hawaii State Capitol to decide who wins outright. In Senate District 20, covering Ewa Beach, Ocean Pointe, Ewa by Gentry, Iroquois Point and part of Ewa Villages, incumbent Senator Kurt Fevella and former lawmaker Bob McDermott each finished with 1,212 votes. In House District 43, covering Kapolei and Makakilo, incumbent Representative Kanani Souza and challenger Sheila Medeiros each landed at 842 votes.
Neither tie showed up on election night. As reported by Hawaii News Now, McDermott held a seven-vote lead over Fevella in the Senate race, and Souza held just a one-vote edge over Medeiros in the House race, margins that survived a 13-hour automatic recount on August 11 with no change. What ultimately erased both leads was a separate process entirely: more than 1,151 Oahu ballots had been flagged as invalid over signature issues, and voters had until 4:30 p.m. that Friday to cure them by signing online, appearing in person, or responding by mail, per the outlet's report. Once those cured ballots were folded into the official count, both contests landed on exact ties.
How Signature Curing Reshuffled the Count
The mechanism behind the flip is built into Hawaii's vote-by-mail system. Because the state automatically mails ballots to every active registered voter and verifies each return envelope by signature, Hawaii Revised Statutes § 11-106 requires county election officials to notify voters when a signature doesn't match or is missing, and to give them a cure period of up to five business days after Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That statutory window, run through the Honolulu Elections Division since the state shifted to full vote-by-mail elections in 2020, is what let more than a thousand flagged Oahu envelopes get fixed and counted after the initial tallies were already in.
Hawaii law doesn't leave room for a recount rematch or a runoff once a race lands on an exact tie. Hawaii Revised Statutes § 11-157 requires a drawing to determine the winner, and the state's Office of Elections has said it will conduct that drawing at the Hawaii State Capitol and livestream it publicly, according to officials cited by Hawaii News Now. Nationally, Hawaii is far from alone in resolving legislative ties this way — the National Conference of State Legislatures counts 28 states that settle tied legislative elections by drawing lots or similar random methods, versus 12 states that instead order a new election.
Two Very Different Stakes
The two races carry different consequences once the drawing settles them. Whoever wins the Fevella-McDermott draw in Senate District 20 will advance to face Democratic candidate Markus Owens in the November 3 general election. Fevella, who worked as a school custodian at Ewa Makai Middle School before winning his Senate seat in a 116-vote upset in 2018, has served as the chamber's sole Republican since then, according to Honolulu Civil Beat. McDermott, meanwhile, spent 16 years representing West Oahu in the state House across two stints and ran as the GOP's U.S. Senate nominee in both 2022 and 2024, per Ballotpedia.
House District 43 carries higher immediate stakes, since no Democratic candidate filed for the seat this cycle. That means whoever wins the Souza-Medeiros tiebreaker drawing wins the legislative seat outright, with no general election to follow. Souza, a former deputy prosecuting attorney first elected in 2022, currently serves as the House Republican Policy Leader and co-chairs the Hawaii chapter of the bipartisan Future Caucus, according to LegiStorm.
A Small Slice of a Lopsided Legislature
Both tied races sit inside the Republican minority of an overwhelmingly Democratic statehouse. Heading into the primary, Democrats held 22 of 25 Senate seats and 40 of 51 House seats, according to Stateside Associates. Across the state, uncontested races and outright primary wins have already settled most legislative seats, leaving only 30 House seats and five Senate seats still to be decided on the November ballot, per Honolulu Civil Beat's election tracking. That makes these two coin-flip-style drawings an outsized moment for a small number of West Oahu voters, even as the broader balance of power in the Legislature remains untouched.
