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VI. PRESENTATION/DISCUSSION ON CONSTITUTIONAL LAW By Prof. Jon Van Dyke BETHEA: Our next speaker is Prof. Jon Van Dyke, who works with the University of Hawaii , School of Law. And I want to particularly thank him for coming. He' s coming to us to give us some thoughts about the constitutional implications of the one man, one vote rule. I asked him specifically to look at our Charter system. He' s coming here as a volunteer, and he' s contributing his time to this commission. And we welcome you and we thank you very much for doing that. VAN DYKE: Well , thank you all very much for inviting me. Bob suggested that it might be useful to go over some of the constitutional principals that govern the kinds of decisions and responsibilities you folks have before you and so I 've kind of . . . I 've got a few ideas I ' d like to go over , and then would be available for any questions that people might have. I 've been teaching constitutional law at the University of Hawaii for about 13 years now and have worked on state constitutional issues in some detail , and was active at the 1978 Constitutional Convention. I was on the reapportion commission in Honolulu myself in ' 81- ' 82 , and so have particular information about the difficulties of that task. And my wife, Sherry Broder , was counsel to the Honolulu City Charter Commission, also in ' 82 , and I ' d like to talk for a bit about that also because that was an example of a Charter revision process that was a failure in the sense that all proposals were rejected by the voters , and there are certain things that might be usefull to recall in that process , so you may avoid that difficulty in your efforts. Well , let me start with the reapportionment problem and the problem with districting the board. . .the Council . The Hawaii County now has , of course, nine members of its Council with six of them. . .all nine are elected at-large County-wide. But six are designated to live in each one of six specific districts in the County. The. . .what we call this is a multi- member system in the sense that all nine are elected by the at-large system. That can be constitutional . It ' s used in a number of situations. But it does have the potentiality of being unconstitutional. If the result of an at-large or multi-member approach is to exclude certain distinct racial groups or other identifiable political groupings , the U. S. Supreme Court has a lot of litigation, particularly in the South where black people view at-large election processes as discriminating against them. In Mobile, Alabama, for instance, they had a system of having three council members that govern the city and because the whites have a slight majority in the population, all three 105