Primaries in Hawai‘i are brutal, especially when several candidates compete for a party’s nomination. In a state as heavily Democratic as Hawai‘i, the net result is a number of local races where Democrats are elected in their respective primaries and there is no general election.
There was a time when local legislative races were arguably more competitive and more politically diverse. It was a time when state house and senate districts were larger, when candidates were selected from a crowded primary race, and when multiple Democrats and Republicans faced-off in a single general election.
Elections in Hawai‘i would be more competitive and politically diverse with this model, known popularly as multimember districts (MMDs). If we want more dynamic races, there’s no reason why MMDs shouldn’t eventually return to local legislative races.
The Fall of Multimember Districts
In Hawai‘i, MMDs used to be a big thing.
“When we became a state in 1959,” former Republican State Senator Fred Rohlfing noted in 2011, “Hawai‘i’s bicameral Legislature was elected employing MMDs for both the Senate and the House. For example, four senators and four representatives were elected in the general election from the districts of East Honolulu from a party slate of up to four selected by each party in the primary. Every voter in our district could cast up to four votes for both senators and representatives.”
MMDs gave voters more votes–and choices. They could also select both Democrats and Republicans as their favored candidates. One could pick an old-school conservative Republican and a new-age liberal Democrat. They could guarantee a legislature with more ideological diversity.
In his own case, the Republican Rohlfing was elected alongside a Democrat, Vincent Yano. “Many issues can be handled in a bipartisan fashion,” he recalled. “Even substantive issues can be the subject of a team effort.”
That’s how it also worked for Neil Abercrombie, a progressive Democrat who was first elected to the State House in 1975. In the community of Mānoa, he was elected alongside Republicans like Hiram Fong, Jr.
MMDs are still permitted in Hawai‘i, although they’ve been absent for over four decades. The reason dates back to a botched reapportionment effort in 1982.
Hawai‘i’s Constitution, in addition to explicitly permitting MMDs (see Article IV, Section Six), also requires the State to review the boundaries of existing districts every ten years. To do so correctly, two standards must be met.
Firstly, the total number of seats in the House and the Senate must be apportioned among the basic island units of the entire State. A district, for instance, could not be drawn from a chunk of Lāna‘i and the Hawai‘i Kai neighborhood of O‘ahu.
Secondly, the re-drawing of districts (in response to population changes) would require that the average number of registered voters in each district to be “as nearly equal to the average for the basic island units as practicable.” Every House district in Maui County needed to have the same average amount of registered voters as possible, and the same went for every other county.
As long as you meet those two standards, the State Reapportment Commission should be able to draw either single-member districts (where only one candidate is elected, as it the case in every House and Senate seat), or (as it did before 1982) MMDs.
In 1982, however, Hawai‘i’s Reapportionment Commission’s plan was thrown out in the U.S. District Court case of Travis v. King. The court found the plan faulty due to its methodology for factoring the state’s population (the State had drawn districts on the basis of registered voters, not total residential population). The State of Hawai‘i’s 1981 Reapportionment Commission was in a bind and needed to speedily create a new plan, and subsequently threw away MMDs in the process.
1982 marked a practical change in culture, not a true change in law. State law has never been amended to expressly ban MMDs, nor are MMDs unconstitutional. They still exist at the county level (look at Maui or Kaua‘i) and at-least ten states have legislatures with some form of MMDs.
A Call for the Return of Multimember Districts
Just because Hawai‘i follows the principle of ‘one-person, one-vote’ does not mean that MMDs are no longer possible.
The last serious effort to restore MMDs in Hawai‘i occurred in 2011. Former Republican State Senator Rohlfing supported the return to MMDs, and believed that the Reapportionment Committee could legally restore them as part of their plan to re-draw the boundaries of Hawai‘i’s districts.
In May 2011, then-Governor Neil Abercrombie was also open to the idea, although he suspected that MMDs would need to be expressly permitted via an amendment to the State Constitution.
In June, the State Reapportionment Commission ultimately voted against the idea by a narrow difference of five-four. At least one member of the reapportionment commission believed that MMDs were unconstitutional. This was not true. An unreleased letter from the office of the Attorney General confirmed that MMDs were still possible.
Here and there, the concept of MMDs has appeared during legislative sessions. In 2023, Senate President Ronald Kouchi introduced Senate Bill 1562, which never received a hearing.
Technically speaking, Hawai‘i’s Constitution still permits MMDs, although it holds that “not more than four members shall be elected from any district.”
The concept is largely defunct, for now. Candidates will jockey for their party’s nomination, and the grand majority of local races will be sleepy moving into November.
Our elections will be stilted affairs. MMDs should return — and make them more interesting.
Perry Arrasmith can be reached at hello@perryarrasmith.com.
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