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of them have always been white. And the blacks say, well , we ought to at least have one, given our population (inaudible) . And so the court has had a serious of litigation on that and has ruled basically that if you can show that the at-large or multi-member system is adopted, for the purpose of discriminating, of maintaining a white majority for instance, then it would be unconstitutional . In Hawaii , I think it would be hard to kind of show that, because we historically do tend to vote in a multi-ethnic pattern, but that is something to keep in mind. There was some litigation here on the Big Island in the ' 70s involving the way the senatorial districts were selected. At that time there were senatorial . . . three senators from this island and the election at that time was at-large. In other words , there was a County-wide election of all three senators , and the result tended to be that all three would come from Hilo , with none of the rest of the island represented. So there was a lawsuit brought by folks on the west side of the island saying that this at-large approach discriminated against them and had the affect of perpetuating Hilo' s dominance over the rest of the island, and tried to argue that they were entitled to at least one of the three. The lawsuit failed but it nonetheless showed that this is something to be sensitive to, that an at-large election can have the effect of limiting the diversity. Now the response, of course, in this community to that problem is to require that six of the nine be. . . live in specific areas . These six areas that people live in are not equal in population. Some are significantly larger in population than others . So that in. . . that then raises another question, is that fair to have these relatively smaller areas in terms of population, have the same slot as the larger areas have. That issue has also been litigated at the national level . And in a 1975 case called Dallas County Alabama v. Reese, the U. S. Supreme Court said that such a procedure is okay, because the. . . everybody in the county votes for it; you don' t have the one person, one vote problem; and the court said, well , it ' s kind of awkward but if that ' s the way the community wants to compromise and work these things out, it is constitutional . And in Hawaii , in addition to this County, Maui County uses that system for some of its council seats , and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs also uses it . The Office of Hawaiian Affairs has a nine-member board of trustees with five of them specifically designated that they have to come from five different island groupings : Kauai , Oahu, Maui , Molokai and the Big Island. Molokai is the smallest , of course, in that 106