Decision on military population means effort to redraw election maps will start over
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - After months of meetings and statewide public hearings, the people rewriting Hawaii’s election district maps are going back to the drawing board.
And some of them are also blasting the process.
The effort was supposed to wrap up Wednesday. But new military population data led to a decision to exclude nearly 100,000 military members as “non-permanent” residents from the population count.
That means Oahu will lose a state House seat and the Big Island will gain one.
It also means the maps the group already came up with, and that drew lots of heat, must be redrawn.
Before the vote to start over, commissioner Kevin Rathbun called the process “convoluted.”
“I will vote yes with reservations but there has got to be a better way to do this and personally I think if you are on this island you should be counted,” he said.
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