On May 22, a 3-judge U.S. District Court in Hawaii issued a 55-page ruling in Kostick v Nago, 1:12-cv-184. The panel denied injunctive relief to a group of voters who had sued to alter the redistricting plan for state legislative districts. The Hawaii Constitution says redistricting should be based on permanent residents, so the state had altered the Census Data to exclude students and military who seem not to consider Hawaii their permanent residence.
The decision says that the issues are complex, but that no injunction postponing the primary and ordering a new set of districts will be granted. The decision says the lawsuit should have been filed earlier, and points out that if relief were granted, the August primary would need to be postponed. The three judges did not say which one of them wrote the opinion. The three are M. Margaret McKeown of the 9th circuit, and U.S. District Court Judges J. Michael Seabright and Leslie E. Kobayashi.
Census data asks people about their “usual residence”, which means “the place where a person lives and sleeps most of the time” and “is not necessarily the same as the person’s voting residence or legal residence.” The decision does acknowledge that “Hawaii elected officials still represent temporary residents – it is a fundamental Constitutional principle that elected officials represent all the people in their districts, including those who do nor or cannot vote.” The excluded groups include about 8% of the population of Hawaii.
1. 14th Amdt, Sec. 1 — who is a citizen of a State.
2. Census is instantly obsolete – for 2 purposes only –
Apportionment of U.S.A. Rep. gerrymander seats after 1 min. for each State.
Direct taxes – now about dead due to the Fed income tax.
3. Only the sovereign Electors in each State have real political power.
4. P.R. for electing all legislative bodies.
Way too difficult for the armies of morons doing gerrymander cases since 1964 — a mere 48 years of MORONS.
Do other states redistrict like this or is this situation unique to Hawaii?
This is unique to Hawaii due to the large number of non-residents there (primarilly military). It was in their original Territorial Constitution.
Who exactly is an Elector-Voter in the fine warm State of Hawaii — i.e. the top of the various volcano islands ???
Again for the unaware — in a REAL Democracy – a legislative body exists ONLY because ALL of the SOVEREIGN Electors in the regime can NOT generally appear in person and vote on bills/laws.
The courts are brain dead ignorant about Democracy 000001 — since 1964 or even 1776.
Maryland and New York exclude non-resident prisoners and reallocate those with identifiable addresses to their homes of record. Kansas also excludes non-resident students.
http://hawaii.gov/lrb/con/conart2.html
Is Section 3 vague enough for fun and games ???
I wish Vermont did NOT allow out-of-state students to vote
in Vermont!
There are only 620,000 Vermonters, and of those,
400,000 voters,
and then 15,000 college students,
mostly from out-of-state,
and mostly extremely wealthy,
so I believe they have an unfair proportion of influence.
And then they leave.
And we are stuck with their choices.
UNITED STATES MARIJUANA PARTY 2012 candidate
CRIS ERICSON on Official Election Ballot in Vermont
presents her CARTOON SATIRE of what it is like to
be the marijuana candidate in Vermont:
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/05/30/18714380.php
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
http://vtdigger.org/2012/05/29/trail-tidbits-early-birds-file-illuzzi-moves-from-mulling-ag-race-to-auditor-senate-races-in-chittenden-county-heat-up/
by Taylor Dobbs | May 29, 2012
…
No new candidates can
enter a race after June 14.
Five candidates filed petitions on Tuesday:
Attorney General William Sorrell,
Cris Ericson
(running for the United States Marijuana Party
for both U.S. Senate and governor),
H. Brook Paige,
a Republican for U.S. Senate,
Peta Lindsay from the
Socialism & Liberation Party
entered a petition for president.
…
Randy Brock, a Republican state senator, submitted
1,028 signatures for his gubernatorial run.
…
Gov. Peter Shumlin has insisted for months
that he won’t begin
his re-election bid until after Labor Day,
and he has been loathe to acknowledge
that he has spent any money
or hired campaign staff.
…
#2 There may be other States that have provisions in their constitution that are similar, but not used. The New York constitution specifies exclusion of aliens.
The Texas Constitution before 2001 had a provision that would have based senatorial districts on “number of qualified electors”. When the State was redistricted in 2001, the legal provisions were explained to the legislative committees. They were told that the provision for qualified electors might be constitutional, but that they would end up defending how they determined the number of qualified electors. Census data does include age information, but it does not include citizenship data, at least the same granularity as it does population and age data. It also does not include data on state citizenship. Usual residence as defined by the census bureau is not necessarily the same as State citizenship as defined by the 14th Amendment.
For example, President Obama would have been recorded as having a usual residence in the District of Columbia, even though he is an Illinois citizen.
So they were basically told, you can follow the Texas Constitution, but you better have a better means of measuring qualified electors (registration is not a qualification – being a citizen over the age of 18 and not having a disqualification (felony, mental incapacity, etc., is). Or you can just go ahead and use resident census population and you won’t be sued on that ground.
The constitutional change in 2001 was part of an omnibus cleanup, and also removed the restriction in the constitution that a county could only have one senate district. That was unconstitutional, so it likely was just a decision to eliminate the provision that was unconstitutional, and the other provision that was being ignored.
In the original Hawaii state constitution, apportionment was based on registered voters. This among a number of other provisions was challenged in _Burns v Richardson_, which was decided by the US Supreme Court in 1966, soon after _Reynold v Sims_. That case had a bunch of issues, such as whether multi-member districts are inherently unconstitutional. They are not – unless they are politically or racially discriminatory (that is if they prevent a political or racial minority from winning seats that they might in a single-member district system). It is that part of _Burns v Richardson_ is usually cited. Another issue was an overbearing federal court, which was insisting that not only must the Hawaii Constitution be changed, but that it be changed by a constitutional convention, rather than the legislature. Amendments proposed by convention could be voted on at a special election; while those proposed by the legislature had to wait for the next election.
The Supreme Court (Justice Brennan) also wrote:
“Hawaii’s registered voters basis, depending in part upon political activity and chance factors, is not itself a permissible population basis, but may be used so long as it produces a distribution of legislators not substantially different from that which would result from use of a permissible population basis.”
If you read Part III of the decision, you will see that the court did not demand use of total (census) population, but rather was concerned with how the citizen population, or alternatively the electorate was being measured. In response, the Hawaii Constitution was changed from “registered votes” to “permanent residents”.
Because the Supreme Court has explicitly approved population bases other than census population, it is reasonable for the district court to decide that the plaintiff was not likely to prevail on the use of “resident population”. It is possible, but certainly not likely enough to issue a temporary injunction, that they might win on the issue of how that resident population is measured.
The Hawaii reapportionment commission had originally excluded only the military population living on military bases (about 15,000). The Hawaii Supreme Court (in early January 2012) ordered the use of more expansive measures of non-residents (about 120,000) that the reapportionment commission had evaluated but chose not to implement.
So the plaintiffs were asking that the federal district court rule that the Hawaii Supreme Court was not competent to interpret the Hawaii Constitution, or had somehow failed to interpret in a manner that was consistent with the US Constitution. Their case is not so strong as to demand a preliminary injunction, especially considering the possible disruption to the elections, and the direction of the Supreme Court to respect State sovereignty in reapportionment matters.
The final issue was whether Hawaii should be forced to use canoe districts (districts that link areas separated by 100 or miles of international waters), or whether they can continue to apportion legislators among the island groups in the same matter that Congress apportions representatives among States.
That is the sort of issue that only the Supreme Court can decide. All the district court and 9th Circuit can do is to develop the case. The court pointed out that the temporary injunction sought by the plaintiff would not have alleviated that issue.
14th Amdt, Sec. 1. part — All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States [[[and of the State wherein they reside]]].
***
14th Amdt, Sec. 2. part — Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of [[[persons in each State]]], excluding Indians not taxed. ***
Only 5 of 9 SCOTUS folks know the meaning of the words in the 2 sets of brackets — as applied to students and military folks ??? reside Sec.1 — in Sec. 2 Some magic difference ???
The 14th Amdt was worked on for a mere about 6 months in Dec. 1865-June 1866 — every word gone over about 10 times in committees and in both houses of the Congress.