Case Summary

In 1964, a group of Hawaii voters filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s legislative redistricting plan as malapportioned in violation of the Court’s decision in Reynolds v. Sims that districts produce “substantially equal representation for all citizens,” specifically citing the Hawaii Constitution’s provision permitting legislative districts to be drawn with equal populations of registered voters rather than total persons generally.

  • On April 25, 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the plan as constitutional, explaining it is appropriate for a state like Hawaii, which contains unique populations like large concentrations of temporarily stationed, non-resident military personnel, to use a different metric than total population, like citizen population, for legislative apportionment purposes. The Court stated that although Hawaii’s use of registered voters wasn’t a permissible basis for legislative apportionment in itself, it could still be used so long as it produced a distribution of legislators that was “not substantially different” than what would result from using state citizen population figures as the basis.

Significance: The 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause does not categorically require that state legislative districts be apportioned on the basis of total population figures from the decennial census.

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U.S. Supreme Court - 384 U.S. 73 (1966)