New districts will enhance election

A state commission that has redrawn political districts in Hawaii for the upcoming primary election — and for the next 10 years — has put election officials on ever-shorter notice to prepare for election day. If the new state map is approved by the commission today but challenged legally, the dissidents’ arguments will need to be addressed quickly in court.

At this point, however, the Reapportionment Commission seems to have done its work diligently. The outcome should give voters more choices come election day from spirited races.

Hawaii voters are accustomed to voting in primaries on a Saturday in late September, the latest in the nation. However, this year’s primary and nonpartisan preliminary elections were moved to Aug. 11 in order to send absentee ballots to overseas and military voters at least 45 days before the November general election.

Heated disputes in sessions of the Reapportionment Commission and a court challenge upheld by the state Supreme Court have drawn out the length of preparation for this year’s election. The high court ruled on Jan. 6 that members of the military and their dependents cannot be included in the state’s population in determining political districts, and the commission has responded quickly in putting together a new map, excising the military presence.

All this, however, doesn’t allow the state to ignore an agreement made two years ago with the U.S. Justice Department to give military and overseas voters "sufficient time to receive, cast and return their ballots in time for them to counted" in the November election. In response, the Legislature rescheduled the primary date to the second Saturday in August in compliance with federal law. Postponement this year is out of the question, and Chief Elections Officer Scott Nago has said his office needed the maps by the end of February to prepare for the election.

The proposed boundaries unveiled by the commission on Tuesday drew criticism that the lines in the earlier map still were favorable to House Speaker Calvin Say, as maintained by opponents. They place seven pairs of incumbents in the same districts — six in the House, one in the Senate — which Say’s dissidents claim placed more of them in races against other incumbents and put more of them into districts with large numbers of new constituents.

In a commission hearing, Tom Ramsey, chairman of mathematics at the University of Hawaii, presented a study concluding that the earlier boundaries showed "a strong pattern of discrimination," as dissidents were more likely to be put into districts with a larger number of new constituents, putting them at a disadvantage.

Prior to the most recent alterations, Ramsey testified that a dissident legislator would have 52 percent new voters, more than twice on average than non-dissidents, who would have only 24.9 percent newbies. He maintained the pattern of the map boundaries was "so strong that any reasonable person would regard it with suspicion" and "conclude that the unfair treatment was deliberate."

Anyone who works with numbers knows that they can be used to bolster many arguments. Nonetheless, the state’s shifting populations will necessarily spur some district redrawings, and voters will enjoy more open or contested races than they have in a long while. The way lines are drawn is important not just for this year’s election but for those throughout the decade, to be altered only by new census figures 10 years from now.