The Force Against Hawaii’s Unconstitutional Election Awakens

After the Supreme Court blocked Hawaii’s race-based election pending appeal, its organizers—a government contractor named Na’i Aupuni—canceled it and decided instead to seat all the candidates as delegates to a special constitutional convention for the purported new nation of “native Hawaiians.” The plaintiffs have asked the Supreme Court to find the election/convention organizers in contempt of its earlier order. Meanwhile, the appeal of the district court’s earlier denial of an injunction proceeds in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Cato has joined the American Civil Rights Union on a brief supporting the challengers. We point out that this is the second time that Hawaii has attempted to conduct a discriminatory voter-registration procedure to facilitate a racially exclusionary election. The first time this occurred, the Supreme Court held that such elections violate the Constitution. Rice v. Cayetano (2000). Things are no different this time. The voter qualification requirements here again make eligibility contingent on ancestry and bloodlines, which are nothing more than proxies for race. (There’s a further requirement that voters affirm a belief in the “unrelinquished sovereignty of the Native Hawaiian people,” which is an ahistorical assertion.) Such a discriminatory scheme is per se unconstitutional under the Fifteenth Amendment.