Auwe! The editorial on reapportionment, "Political boundaries fit together well" (Star-Advertiser, Oct. 5), totally misses the point.

The question is not whether excluding nonresident military and their dependents from the reapportionment population base is "wrong." It is constitutionally mandated.

Military-connected residents vote in their "home of record." If they are registered here, they can vote and be counted here. But the vast majority have declared another state as home and, under Hawaii law, they cannot be counted in our population base.

As a retired Navy reservist myself, I welcome them to register to vote as residents. But that isn’t the issue. The new reapportionment plan must meet the requirements of the state Constitution.

A reapportionment commission is appointed every 10 years and charged by our Constitution with a basic task: to use the "total number of permanent residents in each of the basic island units" when allocating legislators "among" the four "basic island units" (BIUs) — the counties. Equal apportionment between BIUs is therefore a pre-eminent constitutional duty. There is a meaningful distinction between Step 1, "Apportionment," and Step 2, "Districting."

Apportionment among the BIUs (Step 1) requires the determination of how many legislators each BIU is entitled, which determination precedes the redrawing of district lines "within" a BIU (Step 2). Thus, the process of redistricting is incidental to the apportionment of legislators "among" the BIUs.

The two-step process is clearly outlined in Article IV of the Hawaii Constitution and was documented as followed by the 1991 and 2001 commissions.

The state Constitution also requires that both steps use a population base of "permanent residents," which logically excludes transients, short-term or temporary residents like active duty-military, their dependents, out-of-state students, etc. This commission attempted to ignore this requirement.

The legislative history behind the "permanent residency" requirement shows that our legislators adopted the 1991 commission’s concern over the "presence of a large number of transients in Hawaii who are included in the federal census population." Their intent was clearly to exclude military and other nonpermanent residents. Voters approved the constitutional amendment by a 2-to-1 ratio.

The military gave the 2011 Reapportionment Commission the following counts:

» Active-duty declaring Hawaii as home state: 933.

» Active-duty declaring other state as home state: 47,082.

» Active-duty dependents in Hawaii: 58,949.

There are approximately 106,000 military-connected non-residents who should be extracted. There are also approximately 15,463 non-permanent resident students. The commission has decided to extract a meager 16,458. The extraction of just 20,094 would shift a Senate seat to the Big Island.

The Hawaii Supreme Court has given sufficient guidance on this issue in Citizens for Equitable and Responsible Government v. County of Hawaii in 2005. The court determined that the broader term "resident population" must exclude nonresident military and college students.

The commission has ignored the constitutionally-mandated process and instead emphasized its inability to determine where on Oahu the military-connected people live. This is a convenient wild goose chase. Those locations are roughly the same as they were in 1991 and 2001 when military and their dependents were correctly extracted. In 2001, this process rightly gave Maui another House seat.

That approximately 99 percent of the military is on Oahu should have significant impact on the apportionment of legislators "among" the BIUs, yet marginal effect on redistricting "within" BIUs. Lack of perfect data where nonresident military and their dependents are precisely situated on Oahu should not deprive neighbor island citizens — permanent residents — of their due representation by the legislators they vote for.

This commission cannot legislate its own interpretation of our Constitution.

Fred Rohlfing is an attorney, former state senator and a member of the Maui Advisory Council-Reapportionment 2001 and 2011.