CHC 1979-06-05 SUBCOMMITTEE - Laserfiche WebLink

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CHAIRMAN ISHIDA: One at-large? How many districts? If this more or less covers what has been proposed, why don 't we look over the present system to begin. . . MR. OMONAKA: There is one other item that has to do with the temporary vacancy. Do you want some discussion on that also? CHAIRMAN ISHIDA: Why don ' t we take that up later. Why don ' t we restrict, right now, to maybe numerical as far as the number of districts, or how we will plan the districting. And then, thereafter, we can take the other areas in Article III. I think there are some other aspects in the article we have to cover, too, but at least now why don ' t we restrict ourselves to the number of council people and the manner of their representa- tion. . .whether it be at-large or district and how many districts. MRS. KOBAYASHI : Has counsel checked into whether the alternatives are constitutional or not? Because at one hearing somebody said that if we accept anything other than the present one, it may not be constitutional. MR. ODA: As I said, previously, the basic problems with the at-large system of the court cases that I could find, was the cases that had ruled that, primarily, the at-large systems were not per se unconstitutional . They were, in many, many cases on the mainland, used in a discriminatory manner to prevent minority groups from exercising political rights. In other words, as you know, if you take this county and say, if you prevent. . .if there was a proponent for districting--district representation, let' s say, from Puna.. .and Puna, let' s say, just theoretically, was made up largely of Mexican Americans. and you didn ' t want a Mexican American to be elected to the county coancil what you do is say everybody should be elected at-large, from the whole island, because you know that the majority of the votes from the whole island are far in excess of those in Puna. So nobody from Puna could ever-get elected unless you set up a districting scheme whereby one candidate from Puna runs at-large, that kind of thing. Generally speaking, the courts tend to favor representation by district wherever possible and need not be numerically one-man, one-vote. They don ' t necessarily condemn at-large, either, so long as it is not used as a basis of discriminating against a certain group of voters, whether they be racial or 'otherwise. The present setup that we have in the charter, in terms of everybody running at-large is not, I wouldn ' t say it is illegal. I think it can stand. It would probably be legal, let me put it in a positive way. But variations of that are also possible. The "example I gave the last time, where in one Supreme Court case they had one representative councilman representirng218 voters, residents rather, and another person had 4,000 people and the Supreme Court upheld that. Clearly, not according to the one-man, one-vote principle. But they look at the overall scheme of things not just numbers. -2-