Voting rights | election law

Subscribe to Voting rights | election law via RSS

The week before last, the Hawaii Supreme Court unanimously invalidated the Reapportionment Commission’s redistricting plan because the Commission included non-residents in the population base, and the Hawaii Constitution requires use of “the total number of permanent residents in each of the basic island units and computed by the method known as the method of equal proportions.” (emphasis added). The court required the Commission to try again.

The Commission has now sought “clarification and/or reconsideration,” first asking the court for more guidance on the method of “extracting” non-permanent residents from the population base and the procedure for preparing a new plan, and second arguing that the inability to separate resident and nonresident military personnel makes the court’s requirement that the Commission do so unconstitutional under the equal protection clause. Motion at 10-11. The Commission notes that Alaksa and Kansas, when faced with similar difficulties avoided the constitutional problem by using the…

Continue Reading Do-Over Sought In Hawaii Reapportionment Case

On January 6, 2011, the Hawaii Supreme Court issued two opinions in the reapportionment challenges, Solomon v. Abercrombie, No. SCPW-11-0000732, and Matsukawa v. Hawaii, No. SCPW-11-000074. Here’s a summary, as well as some thoughts on the court’s rulings (as far as we can tell, the two opinions are identical).

  • To satisfy the one-person-one-vote requirement of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the states must use a method of counting people that approximates “population.”
  • Under the Hawaii Constitution, the only people who are counted for determining “population” for purposes of reapportionment are “permanent residents.” See Haw. Const. art. IV, § 4 (“The [reapportionment] ommission shall allocate the total number of members of each house of the state legislature being reapportioned among the four basic island units … using the total number of permanent residents in each of the basic island units and computed by the method known

…
Continue Reading HAWSCT’s Reapportionment Decision – Who Are “Permanent Residents?”

The Hawaii Supreme Court has issued its opinion in the redistricting cases. Here it is.

More to come after a chance to digest it.

Here is the oral argument:

Stream it above or download it here. Our live blog of the oral argument is here.

Solomon v. Abercrombie, No. SCPW-11-0000732 (Haw. Jan 6, 2012)Continue Reading Opinion And Oral Argument Recording In Hawaii Supreme Court Redistricting Case

No one exiting the Hawaii Supreme Court courtroom yesterday after oral arguments in the redistricting cases (live blog archive here) should have had much doubt about what the court was going to do: it was quite clear it would invalidate the Hawaii Reapportionment Commission’s recent efforts at districting and divvying up the seats in the Hawaii Legislature. The Hawaii Constitution’s mandate to “us[e] the total number of permanent residents in each of the basic island units and computed by the method known as the method of equal proportions,” made the Commission’s approach of including nonpermanent residents in the population base ripe for challenge, despite the Commission’s apparent best efforts to work with the available data.

Late in the day, the court issued two orders (here and here) granting the writs of mandamus in the respective cases, concluding:

[T]he petition for a writ of mandamus and judicial review…

Continue Reading HAWSCT: “Best Efforts” Are Not Good Enough In Reapportionment. But…

If our tech cooperates, on Wednesday, January 4, 2012, starting at 9:00 a.m., we’ll be live blogging the Hawaii Supreme Court oral arguments in the Big Island reapportionment cases, Solomon v. Abercrombie, No. SCPW-11-0000732, and Matsukawa v. Hawaii, No. SCPW-11-0000741. These are original jurisdiction mandamus actions.

Sign up for an email alert in the window below, or simply bookmark this page and return on January 4. In the interim, we will track down the briefs and post them on the blog.

More about the cases below the live blog window.

Here’s a description of the issues from the Judiciary web site:

Petitioners Malama Solomon, Louis Hao, Patricia Cook, Steven Pavao, and Michael Matsukawa filed petitions for writs of mandamus: (1) invalidating the 2011 Final Reapportionment Plan for the state legislature adopted and filed on September 26, 2011 by the State…

Continue Reading Live Blog: Hawaii Supreme Court Oral Arguments In Reapportionment Case

Here’s what we’re reading this fine summer Monday:

  • Land Use Institute – Although we won’t be able to attend the upcoming annual ALI-ABA program in Boston due to a scheduling conflict, we have attended several times in the recent past, and can highly recommend it. The faculty, as usual, is stellar, and includes colleagues Michael Berger,  Amy Brigham Boulris, Bob Foster, Patricia Salkin, Julie Tappendorf, and Gideon Kanner. 
  • 2011 Takings Conference – Another law conference (November 19, 2011), this one devoted (mostly) to how to defeat regulatory

…
Continue Reading Monday Round-Up: Vested Rights, Land Use Institute, And More

Here’s an interesting court of appeal decision about the intersection of technology and direct democracy from the epicenter of citizen lawmaking, California.

In Ni v. Slocum, No. A128721 (June 30, 2011), the court held that a voter using his smartphone to put his “electronic signature” on a petition does not qualify as “personally affixing” his signature to an initiative petition as required by California statute. The initiative in this case was to legalize marijuana.

Examining the language of the statute, the court concluded that “personal” means by the voter’s own hand and that both sides agreed that an e-signature qualifies, but that “affix” is subject to several possible meanings. Thus, because the statutory term is subject to multiple interpretations, the court looked at the legislature’s intent, noting that when it first adopted the “affix” requirement it obviously did not anticipate signing a petition by smartphone: “When the Legislature first…

Continue Reading Cal Ct App: No iSign For You!

The technical legal question before the Court in Nevada Comm’n on Ethics v. Carrigan, No. 10-568 (June 13, 2011) was whether legislative voting by an elected official was “speech” and if so, whether the First Amendment allowed him to vote for a casino development proposal in which his campaign manager and personal friend was the developer’s paid “consultant.”

The Court’s opinion, however, revealed that what was at stake in the case was much more than metaphysical First Amendment questions and “good government” laws, because the heart of the opinion reaffirmed the core principle of representative government: when casting votes, elected and appointed officials are not speaking for themselves, but are exercising power “that belongs to the people.”

Justice Scalia, writing for CJ Roberts, and Justices Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, concluded that a legislator’s vote is not speech because a city council member is not “saying”…

Continue Reading Legislators’ Voting Is An Exercise Of “Power,” Not “Speech”

Today, Honolulu Civil Beat features our piece on Nevada Comm’n on Ethics v. Carrigan, “Do Elected Officials With a Conflict of Interest Have a Right to Vote Anyway?“

We’ve written about the case recently in the Zoning & Planning Law Reporter (Supreme Court Preview: Voting as Speech When a Government Official Has a Conflict of Interest — “Analogy Gone Wild” Or First Amendment Right?, 34 Zon. & Plan. L. Rptr (Apr. 2011)), but the Civil Beat piece is less law-wonky:

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need ethics laws to regulate the conduct of government officials. We could trust that by simply following their consciences, the personal morality of government officials would coincide with “doing the right thing” and we’d end up with a result everyone would agree was “ethical.”

But because we don’t live in a perfect world, an elected official’s view of what’s…

Continue Reading Op-Ed On SCOTUS Carrigan Case: Do Elected Officials With a Conflict of Interest Have a Right to Vote Anyway?

Senior U.S. District Judge Samuel P. King — an iconic figure in Hawaii’s legal circles — passed away last week, sparking an outpouring of praise, reminiscence, and love. While many remember him for his relatively recent role as one of the authors of Broken Trust, the book that sparked the reformation of the Bishop Estate trustees, his long service on the state and federal benches mean that his impact was much broader.

We can’t add much to how Judge King is being fondly remembered by others, except to note this one nearly forgotten snippet that resulted in a published opinion of the Hawaii Supreme Court that’s certainly not more than a footnote in Judge King’s life, but it is an interesting peek into local politics, how those politics can seem to creep over into judicial decision making, and how there’s often much more lurking beneath the surface of…

Continue Reading An Interesting Footnote To Judge King’s Career