[Note: The original version of this entry, posted a couple of days ago, was apparently corrupted in some way. Even after my hosting service addressed the problem with comments, this particular post continued to trigger errors. So I deleted the original, and am reposting its content here.

Update: No go! Even after deleting the original and recreating this post, I was still unable to leave a comment. So is there something strange in the code of this particular entry? This is getting to be a bigger mystery!]

A Star-Advertiser editorial confidently pontificated this morning on the still unsettled issue of political reapportionment, taking the side of plaintiffs in a pending federal lawsuit (“Census should guide election boundaries“).

Here’s the main argument.

The state Supreme Court’s ruling in January that determined how boundary lines should be drawn for this year’s election in August made scant reference to the agency created primarily for that purpose: the U.S. Census Bureau. That is why a lawsuit in federal court should result in the prompt ordering of the lines to be redrawn to conform with the nationally customary method of including military and out-of-town students in the population count, in time for the upcoming elections….

In the latest twist in Hawaii’s reapportionment saga, a state legislator and five other Hawaii registered voters on April 6 challenged the state high court’s ruling and asked for a three-judge panel in federal court. In its narrow ruling, the Hawaii Supreme Court made no mention of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids any state from depriving anyone of equal protection of the law.

Such deprivation came via a 1992 amendment to the Hawaii Constitution, which required that only “permanent residents” be counted in determining where lines should be drawn for the state’s political districts. That definition led Hawaii’s Supreme Court to rule this January that the total of the state’s residents should exclude more than 100,000 military members, their families and university students from out of town, from the state’s population. That ruling sent the Hawaii Reapportionment Commission back to the drawing board; the commission, appreciative of the U.S. Constitution, had initially excluded from the population only 16,458 members of the military for lack of data.

The sentence that I’ve highlighted in bold would have been perfectly reasonable if it were attributed to the plaintiffs’ attorney. Instead, the editorial writer acts as if the case has already been decided and inevitably determined that the exclusion of nonresident military personnel results in a deprivation of rights.

The editorial then adds:

The commission noted in its final report last year that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1962 that a state could not exclude military people from the population base “based solely on the nature of their employment,” but that seems to be what the state’s high court mistakenly has done.

Perhaps the editorial writer should have read the rest of that 1966 decision (also see my 1/11/2012 post here, “1966 U.S. Supreme Court case allowed exclusion of Hawaii’s nonresident military population in apportioning political districts“).

As I noted there, the Supreme Court tackled the issue head-on, but not in the manner suggested by the editorial’s limited reference.

Instead, the court noted that military personnel could easily declare themselves residents and register to vote in Hawaii. They are not barred from political participation as a result of their military status.

From the 1966 decision:

The District Court noted “that there is nothing in the State Constitution or the Hawaii statutes which per se excludes members of the armed forces from establishing their residence in Hawaii and thereafter becoming eligible to vote. This court finds no scheme in Hawaii’s Constitution or in the statutes implementing the exercise of franchise which is aimed at disenfranchising the military or any other group of citizens.”

And the court clearly stated that a population base other than the census count could be justified.

I’m not deciding the current case here. I’m just pointing out that the issues are certainly not as black and white as the Star-Advertiser is asserting, and it’s way to early to be assuming that anyone is being deprived of constitutional rights.