The Hawaii State Reapportionment Commission voted Thursday to redraw the maps for state lawmakers after the state Office of Elections received new numbers for military members who are not permanent state residents.
The new maps will reflect a change in the distribution of state House of Representatives districts across the islands, as the new numbers will result in Hawaii island gaining a House seat and Oahu losing one.
Hawaii island currently has seven House seats, while Oahu has 35.
The Reapportionment Commission is required to request numbers from the military about military members living in Hawaii who were counted in the U.S. census but are not permanent residents. It also counts the number of full-time students who are not permanent residents. The commission then extracts that number of people from the map.
The extraction number that the commission has been working with to draw the maps is 64,415. However, the new number that has been presented to the commission is 99,617.
In comparison, in 2011 the Reapportionment Commission extracted 95,447.
The first numbers that were sent to the commission from the military did not include military spouses and dependents. The updated numbers, transmitted in late December, did.
This week’s meetings were originally expected to conclude the reapportionment process. The commission created a technical permitted interaction group, or PIG, comprised of four members to draw the district maps. The PIG was supposed to present the final maps to be voted on by the commission this week.
The maps that were proposed drew controversy over two main issues: a district that would have combined Kailua, Waimanalo and Portlock, and the breaking of Mililani into several different districts.
However, the commission present at Thursday’s meeting voted unanimously,
although some with reservations, to accept the new military extraction numbers. The commission members then voted to direct the PIG to readjust the map statewide to reflect the population changes.
Commission Chairman Dr. Mark Mugiishi said that although the methodology for the military extraction number was imperfect, he and the staff could not figure out a better way at this time.
“It’s a very imperfect process,” he said.
“It makes me very uncomfortable that in some of the census blocks, there are more people that need to be extracted based on this data than actually are recorded in that census block.”
Because the maps are drawn using census data, and the military extraction number is based on a separate dataset provided by the military, there are certain census blocks that have negative numbers of people after the extraction, so people from nearby census blocks are extracted to make up the difference.
Commissioner Dylan Nonaka raised issues with the mixture of the census data with the military data.
“The census doesn’t identify whether you’re active-
duty military and whether you’re a permanent, nonpermanent (resident). And the military data does not count whether or not you were counted by the census in the first place,” he said.
“So we’re taking a dataset and making a large amount of assumptions based on that dataset to try and do what we think is best to satisfy a very imperfect and somewhat impractical constitutional requirement.”
Despite the many concerns raised by the commissioners about the accuracy of the military extraction data, the public testimony given during the meeting was overwhelmingly in favor of using the 99,617 military extraction number over the 64,415 number.
Becky Gardner, who worked as a lawyer when the last reapportionment map was challenged in 2012, provided testimony supporting the new military extraction number.
“It’s very obvious that this most recent data is the most efficient, and it makes sense to go with it,” she said.
Gardner pointed to the 2012 Hawaii Supreme Court decision in Solomon v. Abercrombie, where the 2011 reapportionment map was successfully challenged in court over the military extraction numbers.
The military extraction numbers do not effect congressional districts.
While the commission is on a tight deadline to submit a map by the end of February because of the upcoming election, Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz noted that the state Legislature could pass a bill to push back the candidate filing start date of March 1, which could allow more time for the reapportionment process. He said the main deadline that cannot be moved is in June, when candidates need to turn in their papers.
The state Senate Government Operations Committee is expected to have a meeting regarding the reapportionment process, and methodology for the military extraction numbers, at 10 a.m. Monday.
