Posted on: Monday, July 23, 2001

Editorial
Congressional districts should be consistent

It happens every 10 years: a nine-member bipartisan Hawai'i Reapportionment Commission redraws the 51 state House districts, 25 state Senate districts and two congressional districts on the basis of the new census.

The object is to protect the desirable constitutional principle of "one man, one vote," but in practice there's always a bit of room for political favoritism.

An example of the maneuvering that can take place is a proposal for new congressional districts submitted by U.S. Rep. Patsy Mink. She hopes to equalize populations by moving Waipahu into her generally rural and Neighbor Island Second Congressional District, while moving Waimanalo and Kapolei/'Ewa Beach into Rep. Neil Abercrombie's urban District 1.

Presumably her thinking includes considerations such as the steadfastly Democratic voting of Waipahu and the likely increased Republican voting of suburban Kapolei. It's not known how Abercrombie feels about the switch. More important, perhaps, is the reaction of potential Republican candidates.

There's more than one way to skin this cat. What's being called the "north-south" proposal would make the 1st district include the Big Island and Maui County, along with a much smaller urban area including Kailua but excluding Pearl City. This has geographic simplicity but little else to recommend it.

Either way, the numbers add up to equal districts, but with clearly different effects.

No redistricting plan will satisfy everyone, and the opportunity for controversy will only grow when the commission starts redrawing the state legislative districts. We've long believed that a return to multi-member districts would minimize these difficulties.

It should be possible to avoid obvious conflicts and keep anomalies like "canoe" districts a rarity. On balance, the guiding principle here should be to make a district reflect neighborhoods with as much as possible in common, so their representative will have less trouble speaking for all of his or her constituents.

While the benefits of packaging rural O'ahu with the Neighbor Islands may not be as clear as they used to be, it still offers a better concentration of similar interests. We wonder, therefore, at forcing rural Moloka'i into the same district as downtown Honolulu.