by Andrew Walden

Describing the Hawaii Supreme Court ruling to its readers, today’s Hawaii Tribune-Herald explains:

In its opinion, the court noted that the commission has already acknowledged a statewide population of at least 62,545 out-of-state university students and active duty military who declare Hawaii not to be their home state. There are also 58,949 military dependents who do not call Hawaii their home state.

That would make a total nonpermanent resident population of 121,494, and most of them live on Oahu.

If that number is subtracted to determine the total number of Hawaii permanent residents, the Big Island will gain a fourth seat in the Senate and an eighth seat in the House.

It is not clear how many humans the Supreme Court wants exculded (see below), but this ruling is a plain and obvious violation of the US Constitution. For instance in Mann v Davis (1964) the US Supreme Court ruled: “The fact that large numbers of military or military-related personnel reside in the same areas as appellees cannot justify underrepresentation of those areas, because the nature of their employment alone provides no proper basis for discrimination….” The Mann decision is one of dozens of voting rights cases all of which were decided the same way.

All that is required is a lawyer with guts, plaintiffs with guts, and funding to pay for legal costs. SCOTUS will slap this Hawaii Supreme Court Decision down 9-0 and order the Reapportionment Commission to count every human being. The time to file this case is now. If nobody steps up, then this unconstitutional system will continue and the meth dealer’s friend, Malama Solomon, will have a State Senate seat built on illegal discrimination against military personnel and African-Americans.

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Full Text: Hawaii Supreme Court 29 page decision: http://www.courts.state.hi.us/docs/opin_ord/sct/2012/jan/SCPW-11-0000732pc.pdf

Background: Reapportionment- Hawaii Supreme Court Rejects One Man-One Vote, Disenfranchises Blacks, Military

Background: Military to be Disenfranchised so Meth dealer’s friend can keep Senate Seat?

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A panel redrawing legislative districts does not know how many nonpermanent citizens to exclude

Star-Adv: The Hawaii Supreme Court issued an opinion Friday detailing the flaws in the state Reapportionment Commission's plan to allocate legislative seats among the islands and draw boundaries for legislative districts.

But in its 29-page ruling the court did not say how many nonpermanent residents must be excluded.

The high court's decision elaborates on its order issued Wednesday declaring the plan adopted by the commission invalid because it did not exclude enough nonpermanent residents as mandated by the state Constitution.

Former state Judge Victoria Marks, the commission chairwoman, said the opinion does not give much guidance on how many nonpermanent residents must be excluded.

She said she is considering asking the high court to clarify its decision.

What's more, Marks said she doesn't know whether the commission can prepare a new plan before Feb. 1, when candidate nomination papers are supposed to be available for the House and Senate seats.

The high court noted that the commission's task was twofold: first, to allocate the 25 members of the Senate and 51 members of the House among the four counties; and second, to apportion the legislative members within the counties.

Knowing precisely where nonresidents live is necessary to the second step, but not the first, which requires knowing only the county of residence, the court said.

"The Commission acknowledged at oral argument that it did not differentiate the step one process from the step two process," the court said. "The Commission's military data, university data and census data on the state's non-permanent residents identified, for step one, the resident counties of over 100,000 non-permanent residents, but identified, for step two, the resident addresses for only 16,458 non-permanent residents," the court said.

Using the larger number would reduce Oahu's senators to 17 from 18 and increase Hawaii island's senators to four from three.

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