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<br />technique by which a political party attempts to give itself an unfair advantage in
<br />redistricting, and there’s specific terms for these things. There’s one called packing,
<br />which is drawing your boundary lines so that voters who support candidates of a minority
<br />party are concentrated or packed into a few districts. And, then there’s another one called
<br />cracking, where you draw the district lines, so the voters are broken up. There’s also
<br />pairing and kidnapping. You can look at these in more detail in the paper, but they all
<br />have a purpose, and that purpose is trying to determine where political minorities are
<br />located and draw districts to sort of limit their ability to be successful in electing their
<br />candidate.
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<br />So, there’s mechanisms to control the gerrymandering, and we have a number of those in
<br />our laws here. One is restricting who can draw plans, using a Commission rather than
<br />incumbents. So, that’s what we’re doing here. We have restrictions on the data to be used
<br />and in this case, we have to use the census population data. Also, using defined
<br />procedures that include review by others, holding public hearings, which we’re doing,
<br />and getting input from public and having reviews before we adopt anything, and also
<br />restrictions on the way the districts are drawn, such as, we heard about today, with the
<br />contiguous territory, having them be compacted, not dividing communities of interest.
<br />And, you even have the luxury of software that lets you know, right up front, beep-beep,
<br />you can’t do this. I didn’t ask the question, but I was curious about overrides. Kind of
<br />reminded me of trying to use one of those tax programs when you kind of don’t fit what
<br />they have in there.
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<br />But what helps a plan stand up in court? And there’s a lot of information in that article,
<br />but just to kind of briefly summarize, of course it’s using the correct data, the counts from
<br />the 2020 census. They talk about the fact you can’t exclude undocumented persons in the
<br />census because it’s not limited to citizens, it counts persons. And then the military issue,
<br />and our Hawaiʻi County Code says that non-resident military personnel, dependents, non-
<br />resident students, foreign nationals, or aliens, shall be excluded from the permanent
<br />resident population base used to calculate each proposed council district’s population,
<br />and its deviations from an ideal council district’s population if practicable.
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<br />Now, I think we were shown that military personnel data and student data had been
<br />excluded from the census data that you get to work with. I don’t know that we have a
<br />way, easily, of doing that for undocumented persons or foreign nationals. Again, that
<br />little thing at the bottom that says if practicable, is kind of our saving grace because if
<br />you don’t have a way to do it, then of course, you’re limited and anytime you go and start
<br />adjusting data, it could raise other problems if what you’re using, the means you’re using
<br />to adjust it, are unreliable. So, that one is kind of out there as a question to me a little bit.
<br />It could be something that the Commission asks or wants to get more information on, I
<br />don’t know.
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<br />The census geography—again, this is something where we’ve—we can see we have a
<br />st
<br />public law where we were supposed to have received this before April 1in the year
<br />th
<br />ending in one, and here we are, what September 9 and we’re still just getting up and
<br />running. So, we kind of have an impediment right there. Whether that will pose a legal
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