By B.J. Reyes
Associated Press
Jan. 4, 2003
HONOLULU - The political free-for-all that began with the death of a longtime
congresswoman finally comes to an end today when Hawaii voters hold their fourth
election in 3 1/2 months to fill the same House seat.
Forty-four candidates are on the ballot, but a half-dozen of them have pulled
away from the pack, and the front-runner is Ed Case, the Democrat who has held
the seat since November.
The race is the nation's last unsettled one for Congress.
The seat had been held for 24 of the past 38 years by Democrat Patsy Mink. She easily won the Sept. 21 primary but died a week later at 74, after the deadline for the party to replace her name on the general election ballot. She won the Nov. 5 election posthumously.
In a special election held Nov. 30, Case won the right to serve out the remainder of Mink's term, which expires next week when the new Congress is sworn in.
Case is seeking a full two-year term of his own in today's election.
Case, a cousin of AOL-Time Warner Chairman Steve Case, will have to beat Democrats Matt Matsunaga, son of a U.S. senator, and Colleen Hanabusa, a state lawmaker.
But with so many names on the ballot, a few Republicans cannot be counted out either in a race where the winner will simply be whoever gets the most votes. The GOP was able to get out the vote in the general election and elected Linda Lingle Hawaii's first Republican governor in 40 years.
The GOP hopefuls include former state Rep. Bob McDermott, who lost to Mink in the general election but received 40 percent of the vote, and state Reps. Barbara Marumoto and Chris Halford.
"It's going to be very difficult to call," said political analyst Dan Boylan, a history professor at the University of Hawaii. "There's just an enormous number of imponderables."
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