 Yeah, it's a given Thursday, so I'm on the clock block here in Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. That's Sandy Ma. She's with Common Cause Hawaii and she's a good friend of Think Tech and she's going to talk about redistricting and she's going to give us an update today about what's going on because plenty is going on. Welcome to the show, Sandy. Thank you, Jay, for having us. So what's the core point of the update? You have things going on in redistricting. Can you tell us what those things are? Yeah, so reapportionment and redistricting is actually incredibly important to Hawaii and to the nation. It only happens once every 10 years. It happens after the census. So the census is where everyone gets counted and I think everyone remembers back in 2020. There was a lot of news and buzz about fill out your census information so you get counted. So at that time we let the government know that we are here. Everyone gets counted. Even babies born on April 1 of 2020 get counted and the reason that it's done is so that we can make sure that our communities get the services that are needed. And so after every person gets counted and that's required in the U.S. Constitution on the next year, it's reapportionment. And that is when the people get allocated by state and we know how many people are living in each state for the U.S. representatives in the house. And so that's vitally important to representation in Congress. We found out that some large states such as California and New York lost people. People have migrated out of those states and they are going to lose some representatives in Congress. And some states such as Texas have gained representatives. And so that shifts the balance of power. If you are a Democrat or a Republican you're thinking, oh wow, those states are going to gain seats. Hawaii we have are going to keep our two house representatives. So that's reapportionment and we are lucky we're keeping our two because we have heard a lot of news about how there's this brain drain and people are moving to the mainland because it's so expensive to live in Hawaii. But Hawaii's actually gained seats, excuse me, not seats, but gained population based off the census in 2020. We've gained population so that's good. So that's reapportionment on the federal level. Well, let me talk to you about what you said so far. So you have a census every 10 years and the federal census takers go around and they take numbers and they knock on your door and say how many people in the house and blah. They may ask survey questions too but the bottom line is how many people in the house. And then you take a map and you say, there's a district there and we know that X people live in the district. And we're going to fill in the whole state by these districts. We're going to send that information to Washington, sort of like a second census, if you will. Oh, that's the first census. And then that map based on the first census goes to Washington also and that will affect the distribution of resources and benefits and so forth from various programs in Washington. It doesn't sound like rocket science to me. If you have a district, call it Moela Ely. If you have a district, Moela Ely, you know the boundaries, you walk the district, you take the numbers, you put them on a map, you send the map to Washington. What's so complicated? Well, actually the district boundaries are drawn here in Hawaii and that's the second part. The first part is counting of the people and then the second part is drawing the lines and that's what's going on right now. Right now we are drawing the lines and that's what's really incredibly important to local Hawaii and what we are doing here because when we draw the lines, we determine who we could elect to office for the next 10 years because this is only done once every 10 years. And so we draw the lines for how we vote for our two federal representatives, how we vote for every state elected people to our state legislature, all 76. We draw the lines for Honolulu City Council, all nine of them, and we draw the lines for our nine Hawaii County Council members. Maui does not draw lines. We have council districts but we're not going to redraw them because everyone can vote for all nine council members and that's the same for Kauai County. So redrawing those lines based on population shifts where we have seen taken by the 2020 census is incredibly important. But you mentioned that Kauai and Maui, everybody's at large and it's just one district. That sounds very equitable to me and it avoids the need to redraw a reapportion. Why don't we do that in every county? Well, some may say that is equitable and other people may say that's not quite fair. Why should someone in Hana who lives in Hana be able to vote for the representative on Molokai? Shouldn't it be people on Molokai voting for people on Molokai to represent from Molokai? Vice versa. And so that is the reason why and right now the Maui Charter Commission is actually deciding that issue to actually draw lines so that when you live in that district you vote for your people and that district instead of having someone vote for your representative. The division there would be between the two islands I guess Maui and Molokai but not not calming up Maui or Molokai. Yes, it is actually creating districts voting districts. Yeah. So you said we make the maps, remake the maps based on I guess its population I guess. What is it based on and who is we? Is it you? Is it me? Is it some government official? Is it federal? Is it state? Who are they? So the state has a reapportionment commission that's made up of nine members. There are eight members appointed by the legislature. So two from the Senate president, two from the Speaker of the House, two from opposite members, from the party of the opposite party of the Speaker, two from the opposite party of the House. Excuse me, two from the opposite party of the president of the Senate and then those eight people select a ninth member and so there is a nine member state reapportionment commission and they get together and they draw maps and they draw the federal lines which are just two lines because we just have two representatives and then they draw 76 lines for us for the 76 representatives at the state legislature, 25 in the Senate, 51 in the House and 2022 which is just next year. Our federal congressional representatives are up for election and all 76 state House members are up for election also. So what what standards do they use when they draw? Because the standards could have a big effect on voting districts and on resources. So there are federal standards in the U.S. Constitution. It is one person one vote so all the districts lines that are drawn should be equal basically. It should be one person one vote it should be equal except for the fact that it is really hard if you live in one district it is very hard to have equal districts. So there could be deviations, a percentage deviation. Also the lines should be contiguous. They should follow natural geographic features. They should follow census blocks. So there are rules in our constitution, federal and state constitution. They should not be drawn to favor one political party or an elected official. There are rules. When I say who draws, these are not absolute rules and they are subject to interpretation by the committee so to speak. The commission. Yes. So the commission is actually meeting today is Thursday, September, blue is time when it is coded. So the state commission is meeting today at one o'clock and they already have proposed federal lines drawn. And so they are going to be showing these lines to the public. And when I say who should be drawing these lines and I always say we, I think it's the people. The people should have a say because when lines are drawn, it determines who we can elect to office. And so that's why I say it's we and we should say that the process for drawing the lines should be open and transparent and we should be able to have a say in the process and we should also be able to view the lines and question how the lines were drawn. We should be able to submit our own proposed maps. So that's why I say it's us, we the people, because in Hawaii, a slight deviation by meteor blocks can result in major changes. Yeah, so it sounds pretty sensitive. So do people actually come down? What kind of person comes down? And if I come down because I care about this and I care about preserving voting rights and democracy, I think we should be very sensitive to that, especially now. Then I come with an alternative map and I come with my arguments and my analysis, whatever it may be. And we're going to listen to me. Are they going to accept my view of it? What chance do I have of being heard, really heard? Well, in the 2021, excuse me, 2011 reapportionment redistricting cycle, about 200 maps were submitted by the public for commission review. There is a public hearing phase when maps are presented by the commission. The commission has to present it for public hearing. And so at that time, you could comment, the public could comment on these maps and say, this splits my community. For example, if I'm Native Hawaiian and my Native Hawaiian community is split so that I cannot form a voting block, that I cannot vote my interests and my interests cannot be heard, it is definitely the time to speak up and say, why did my community get split? I think a better map would be this map that I am presenting to you. And at that time, definitely it should be submitted. And I have heard from 2011 that maps have been revised to represent community interests, to take into community concerns. So yes. You could just say, Native Hawaiians may have a community that stretches into two portions of the map. But what about Democrats and Republicans? Because they could make an argument that sounds like that. I want to take a moment and just connect up, if I could, some of the politics that have played here. In the last census, we had some very strange things going on in Washington about people with immigration status, and they had to answer a question in the census. And some people whose immigration status may not have been perfected were intimidated and were predictably intimidated and didn't participate. And that affected the accuracy of the census. Also, Donald Trump cut the census off a month or two before it was supposed to be cut off. I guess he felt that would somehow help him with the Republican Party in the count because people weren't being counted at the end. And they lost a month or two because of that particular maneuver. And that's on the census side. And on the redistricting side, where you say redistricting, reapportionment is pretty much the same thing. And then you cross a little line, you get to gerrymandering, which we had in the Trump administration. And maybe before that, I mean, gerrymandering is from a fellow named Jerry back in the 19th century who twisted these maps around, and they named it after him. But if it was me, I wouldn't really appreciate having that named after me. Nobody should call it gerrymandering. Anyway, so gerrymandering is a negative, gerrymandering is still possible. I recall the Lingle administration put a lot, Republican, put a lot of time and effort into redistricting. She had a whole team going to try to redistrict. And it was clearly for political purposes to advance the Republican community. And finally, I'll stop in a minute. Finally, you mentioned this opposite party thing. We really have 99% Democratic Party in the state. So when you say the opposite party of the Democrats, that means the Republicans. The Republicans are overweighted in this commission, overweight and clearly. And they're going to be looking for their own interests. They're very sensitive as a political party to reapportionment. And for that matter, gerrymandering, how do we keep gerrymandering out of this equation? So let's talk about the census. First of all, there were a lot of Supreme Court cases filed regarding having everyone counted. All people, the word is people in the Constitution, not citizens. And so in the end, the citizenship question was not on the census. So all people are counted. You'll agree with me, Sandy. That did not affect the quality of intimidation for the average person who had concerns about his or her citizenship or immigration status. That Supreme Court case is not going to alleviate their level of concern very much. Yes. So there definitely was tensions in the immigrant community regarding the census. So I don't disagree with you on that, Jay. But in the end, the people who were on the ground conducting the census, and there were a lot of foreign language speakers conducting the census, there were a lot of nonprofit communities, excuse me, nonprofit organizations engaging in communities to talk about the accuracy of the census and the need for everyone to be counted. And so while trepidations were there, we hope that everyone did get counted. All people did get counted. And so that's one part of the census question. Another part are the people who worked in the U.S. Census Bureau, who actually crunched the data and common causes position is that they are fine individuals and they worked diligently and produced good accurate data that we are going to rely on for reapportionment and redistricting. We trust in their work. And so this data is, we haven't seen any evidence that this data is tainted given the last administration. I would agree from my observation, we had a number of census takers on our shows during the course of the census. And your description of them as individuals is consistent with the kind of people who showed up to talk about it. Yeah. And so for reapportionment and redistricting, so reapportionment is the reallocation of the numbers so that within the districts and redistricting is a line drawing that's going on here. And as for having the Republican balance on the reapportionment commission, we'd like to see everyone represented. And we have been fielding some questions about, well, what about libertarian parties? What about Aloha Aina or Green Party? Or what about, you know, independence? Why are they not represented on a reapportionment commission? And, you know, that is true. Perhaps we should have an independent citizen redistricting commission instead. Why just two parties? And per your comment, it really, why should Republicans have four seats when it's really a Democratic state? But it should be the people drawing the lines because it really represents, we should dictate who we get to represent versus Republicans and Democrats drawing the lines so that only Republicans and Democrats get elected in the long run. Well, sure. I mean, you know, it's a natural inclination. If I'm, say, a Republican on that commission, and I'm involved in the original draft, so to speak, of the map, I'm going to favor an interpretation, a geographical interpretation that will get me more votes, more resources for my, you know, which was the case back 10 years and 20 years ago. And I would say it's still the case, perhaps increasingly so. Republican Party is a national experience. And part of its visible agenda is to try to control reapportionment. And for that matter, try to gerrymander. So you have to assume that. You have to assume that. So what controls do we have on that when they come in and participate in map drawing that favors them? Well, it is, like I said, a balanced process of four and four with one person agreed upon by all the eight other members for the State Reapportionment Commission. And people need to become involved in the process because this process decides who we get to vote for for the next 10 years and what resources are allocated to our community. And we should be able to vote for people who adequately represents our community and who knows our community. And so while there are guardrails in our state constitution and the federal constitution and in the Voting Rights Act, as you have said, they could be circumvented like we have seen with gerrymandering on the mainland, which we don't see that. We don't really see that here in Hawaii. But people really need to testify before the reapportionment commission at the state level and at the county levels to the two counties, Honolulu and Hawaii County to say we are watching you. We want transparency in the process and we are ready to submit our own maps to show how the lines could be drawn that adequately reflect our community, not some political party. Good. I'm happy to hear that. So, common cause. Common cause is a wonderful organization. It's a bulwark of our national democracy. So important these days. More important now, perhaps than ever. And, querie, why and to what extent are you involved in this process? Are you drawing maps? Are you looking at maps? Are you commenting on maps? Are you down there? Would you be down there today? What does common cause do about this? Thank you for that question. And thank you for stating what our organization is. We are trying to alert the people as to the importance of reapportionment and redistricting and how it impacts us for the next 10 years. You know, something that happens only once every 10 years. We kind of forget about it. That's only natural. I forget about things that happened yesterday. And so this is highly important. And then kind of wonky and difficult to comprehend at times. And we want people to know about this process. And while with COVID kind of, you know, impacting all of our lives, these meetings are all held on Zoom. And so we have been advocating for transparency in the process with all the commissions stating that, you know, they need to publicize these meetings. They need to make public testimony more easily accessible. Allow the public to testify after each agenda item to have their board materials or commission materials available earlier in the process so that we have time to review them. We held a recent training just the other day for our members and for the public about why redistricting is important and what they could do about it, how they could testify, and what they should testify about, which is their community and how their community could be impacted. We will soon be having another training on how to draw maps. What comma cause is doing is we're not going to draw maps for the community because I don't represent our organization does not represent the entire community. I could draw maps for the my community that I live in, but I cannot draw map for Hilo community or Lahaina community because I don't live there. It has to come from the community. And so that's why the community has to get involved. So you're interested in the process. You want to make sure the process is hygienically clean and that people are heard and that the rules are being followed, that the maps are being are fair, and there is no sign of gerrymandering or inappropriate reapportionment. And that's appropriate. And it's good that you're the watchdog on that. Somebody needs to be somebody not government needs to be. But suppose Sandy just hypothetically, you find that something is awry. Something is wrong in mudville. What happens? What do you do? Well, you know, we are prepared to litigate. You know, if something is truly wrong with the process, if people are shut out of the proceedings, then then we will, you know, litigate. We have the resources to litigate. We will litigate. For example, our sister organization in Illinois, the Illinois redistricting commission over there, created maps even before the census data was released. They created maps from the American Community Survey data, which is not the census data. You create maps from the census data. And so they're going to litigate over that. Good. That's right. We've had enough corrosion, if you will, on our democracy over the past few years. We can't afford anything that corrodes voting rights. And you mentioned the Voting Rights Act that you governed at least in part by the Voting Rights Act. What Voting Rights Act are you talking about? Because there are two of them pending in Congress that haven't passed. Which one governs here? So this is the existing Voting Rights Act section two, which says that if there are minority, majority minority districts that could be created, then we should look closely as to if they should be created. And there are very specific criteria. If minority majority districts could be created and they are a predominant voting block, then they should be created. If they vote in a similar pattern, and they are the predominant voting block, then we have to look closely at it. That raises an interesting question. I suppose I come in either as a Native Hawaiian group that claims to be divided by the map or some other group that has trouble with the map and wants to supplant another map. Now, it seems to me relevant to that would be historically how the people in that district around that line have voted in the past. Does the Commission consider historical voting data also? We have to, yes. Because if they vote, if they have voting patterns that are similar and they could form a voting block that would be the predominant voting pattern and voting block that overrides other groups in that area, then we they have to take a close look at why the district lines have split them. Yeah, and we have, I have asked our Common Cause National Demographer to map Native Hawaiian voters. And there are appears to be some splitting of Native Hawaiian voters on the Big Island. And so, I mean, I'm not saying that that was done intentionally with the eye towards splitting the vote of Native Hawaiian voters. I'm not saying that at all because there are a lot of factors that go into line drawing, such as following geographical features, one person, one vote, following census blocks, which are 300 to 600 people per census block. There's a lot of factors in it. But, you know, you look at that, if I was, if I lived in that area in Hilo, and I am a Native Hawaiian voter, Native Hawaiian activist, I would say, is there any way I could draw a line now for 2021 that would, you know, capture my Native Hawaiian community versus splitting it between three different districts. And so that's something to consider. And I hope that this commission will take a look at that. Well, the motion on the table would be we're going to, we're going to change the line. We're going to move the line here or there to make it in our view more equitable. But queries, suppose you say nine members of commission, for example, you had a five to four split or one to eight or whatever it is, you could have a disagreement in the voting just like in the Supreme Court. How, you know, and the majority would win. Is that what happens? Yes. So they present a map to the public for public comment. And then that's the draft draft map for public comment. Then it comes back after public comment to see what the public comments are like rulemaking, right? And then it gets adopted. And then that's the final map for the next 10 years. 10 years. So you said there was a meeting today. Where does it go from here? I suppose there are other meetings in other places and then there are meetings of the commission. How long does it take and what else can we expect to see along the road to completion? So this is a really big meeting of the state reapportionment commission. This meeting, they're going to decide on extraction of military and non permanent resident military and students. Hawaii is the only state for reapportionment and redistricting that we don't count everyone. For census, we count everyone. And then for our reapportionment and redistricting, we extract out non permanent resident military and students. And that's under our state constitution. And if you think about it, on a Wahoo, we have a lot of military bases. And we have our largest learning institutions, higher learning institutions. And when you extract out people, that reduces our count. And if you reduce those counts enough, it could give our neighbor islands extra house, extra state house and Senate seats and shifts power to neighbor islands. Yeah, well, you know, students may come and go, but they to the extent a student leaves, another one will come in. So if you're looking at the demographics of it, it may be more constant than just excluding students. The same thing with military. If I have, I don't know, say 100,000 military on the island, and I exclude them, doesn't seem quite right because those people will be rotated out, but there'll be another 100,000 in. So the number is fairly constant. To exclude them all doesn't sound equitable. So extraction. So the apportionment data is as of April one 2020, which is the census data. So it's it's extracting people who've declared another state as their permanent residents. And that's what they've declared as of the census date of April one 2020. And so so it's kind of a interesting analysis. Yeah, well interesting. Maybe maybe it raises the last question I was going to ask you, Sandy. And that is this, you know, in a democracy, the thing that democracy should allow. I think the founding fathers were onto this is that society changes. Voters change, voting districts change, it all changes. And they were pretty far-sighted to realize that those changes should be reflected in the apportionment. And so, you know, it's it's credit to them, but it's also credit to the people who were involved, including you, that you that you recognize that you deal with you analyze the changes we need to change with the times. And that suggests to me the possibility that maybe the state legislature from time to time would tune this whole thing up and have a bill here or there on some part of the process in order to, you know, recognize changes, improve the system. What have you other bills? Should there be bills that tune this up? So yeah, so that's that's a really interesting question you just raised. Because as you mentioned before, reapportionment redistricting is fraught with political considerations and, you know, Republican Democratic, you know, conflict, if you may. And so in this past 2021 legislative session, there were, there was a bill introduced and was signed into law about about this process, current process that we're going through. And it actually shifted the date of when people need to file to run for office because the census data was released so late. So sometimes that little type of fine tuning to allow people to run for office can be beneficial because the census data was so late, but also was controversial and part of the bill because they tried to change how non-permanent residence was defined. And that is there was a Supreme Court decision on it, Solomon versus Abercrombie, and it's in our Hawaii state constitution. So there were some issues around there. So yes, so there are issues. People on the neighbor islands like the extraction because then power is not so concentrated on a Wahoo. So yes, it is fraught with political implications. Yes. That's the American system, I suppose. Then if the legislature does something that's, you know, unfair or favors one party or another, more likely, you always have the argument that takes place in legislature itself. You have the possibility of a veto, you have the possibility of litigation on state or federal constitutional grounds. So this is part of our process. I don't think we realized that it's part of our process. It does have a direct effect. I'm only happy, Sandy, and I'm sure you are too, that some of those states on the mainland where we have really loony tunes legislation going on on voter rights, and I presume on gerrymandering too. You know, they're there and we're not like them. I am so happy about that. Hawaii still has a democratic, I may not say democratic, but the notion of democracy, a democratic backbone, and we are essentially fair. Would you agree? I hope so. I like to see more people testifying on reapportionment and representing their community and stating why it's important to keep their community together or how maps could be changed to be, to better represent their community. I think that's necessary. Our community certainly has changed a lot on Oahu. Kapolei has grown tremendously west side. It's just, you know. Yeah, and they should be represented too. So if I wanted to know more about this, more about the status of the meetings, more about the maps, more about the ultimate decisions here and how they affect me, where do I look? Do I go to commoncause.org or why? You could just google Common Cause Hawaii. Our slideshow about the reapportionment and redistricting process is up on our website. You could follow us online, Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Our slide deck for reapportionment is up there. You could also look at the state elections website. Office of Elections, State Office of Elections has, you could sign up again, notices there on reapportionment, on the state reapportionment process. Yeah, Common Cause, Common Cause Hawaii, Democracy's Godmother. Thank you so much, Santa. Sandy Ma, Common Cause Hawaii. Thank you so much. Aloha.