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The Hawaii State Redistribution Commission voted Thursday to redraw the maps for state lawmakers after the state Elections Office received new numbers for service members who are not permanent residents of State.
The new maps will reflect a change in the distribution of state House of Representatives districts across the islands, as the new numbers will cause the island of Hawaii to gain a House seat and Oahu to lose one.
The island of Hawaii currently has seven House seats, while Oahu has 35.
The Redistribution Commission is required to ask the military for figures on military personnel 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 this number of people from the map.
The mining number that the board worked with to draw the maps is 64,415. However, the new number that was presented to the board is 99,617.
By way of comparison, in 2011, the Redistribution Commission extracted 95,447.
The first figures sent to the commission by the military did not include military spouses and dependents. The updated issues, transmitted at the end of December, have done so.
This week’s meetings were originally intended to conclude the redistribution process. The commission established an Authorized Technical Interaction Group, or PIG, of four members to draw district maps. The PIG was supposed to present the final maps put to the committee for a vote this week.
The maps that were proposed sparked controversy over two main issues: a district that allegedly combined Kailua, Waimanalo and Portlock, and the split of Mililani into several different districts.
However, the committee present at Thursday’s meeting voted unanimously, although some with reservations, to accept the new military extraction figures. Members of the commission then voted to ask the PIG to readjust the map statewide to reflect population changes.
Commission Chairman Dr Mark Mugiishi said while the methodology for the military extraction number is flawed, he and the staff couldn’t find a better way at the moment.
âIt’s a very imperfect process,â he said.
âIt 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 what is actually recorded in that census block. “
Because the maps are drawn using census data, and the military extraction number is based on a separate data set provided by the military, some census blocks have a negative number of people after the extraction, so that people in nearby census blocks are extracted to tell up the difference.
Commissioner Dylan Nonaka raised concerns about mixing census data with military data.
âThe census does not identify whether you are a military member on active duty and whether you are a permanent or non-permanent (resident). And the military data doesn’t take into account whether or not you were counted by the census in the first place, âhe said.
“So we take a dataset and make a lot of assumptions based on that dataset to try and do what we think is best to satisfy a very flawed and somewhat impractical constitutional requirement.”
Despite the many concerns expressed by the commissioners regarding the accuracy of the military extraction data, public testimony given at the meeting was overwhelmingly in favor of the use of the military extraction number 99,617 over the number 64,415.
Becky Gardner, who was working as a lawyer when the last distribution map was challenged in 2012, provided testimony in support of the new military extraction number.
“It is very obvious that this most recent data is the most effective, and it makes sense to use it,” she said.
Gardner pointed to the 2012 Hawaii Supreme Court decision in Solomon v. Abercrombie, where the 2011 redistribution card was successfully challenged in court over the number of military extractions.
Military extraction figures do not affect congressional districts.
As the commission has a tight deadline to submit a map by the end of February due to the upcoming elections, Senator Donovan Dela Cruz noted that the state legislature may pass a bill to extend the start date. the filing of applications on March 1, which may allow more time for the redistribution process. He said the main deadline that cannot be moved is June, when applicants must submit their papers.
The Senate state government operations committee is expected to hold a meeting regarding the redistribution process and methodology for military extraction figures at 10 a.m. on Monday.
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