Editor’s Note: After this article was published, state reapportionment staff again revised its list of staggered terms. Read more about the changes here.

And then there were two.

Hawaii Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz will join Sen. Jill Tokuda in having to run for a second two-year term in 2012 after just being elected in 2010.

Shifts in the boundaries for the districts represented by Tokuda and Dela Cruz were significant enough to merit the back-to-back two-year terms. That means they both could face three elections in four years.

Staff for the Hawaii Reapportionment Commission on Wednesday revised its list of staggered Senate terms. The list previously had Tokuda as the only one assigned to back-to-back two-year terms in 2010 and 2012.

The emailed revision stated: “Calculations presented at the September 26, 2011 meeting of the Reapportionment Commission did not reflect that the senator in district 11 was unopposed and elected outright in the 2010 primary election.”

The 2012 term lengths for Dela Cruz’s and Carol Fukunaga’s seats have effectively been swapped in the revision. Fukunaga’s seat will be up for a four-year term in 2012, while Dela Cruz’s seat has now been assigned a two-year term.

Commission Chairwoman Victoria Marks told Civil Beat on Wednesday she doesn’t believe the revision requires a vote by the full commission.

Hawaii senators typically are elected to four-year terms, so approximately half have to run for re-election every two years. But because of reapportionment, next year all lawmakers need to run for re-election.

Figuring out the staggered terms could not happen until the commission finalized new political boundaries, which happened Monday. The Hawaii Constitution lays out the for staggering the terms, requiring that two-year terms be assigned to 12 seats for the election immediately following the adoption of the reapportionment plan.

The 12 districts are not randomly selected, but are calculated to have had “the smallest populations of participation in the 2010 senatorial elections,” according to reapportionment staff. In other words, how many residents in a newly drawn district live in a current district that elected a senator in 2010.

Here’s a revised list of the 12 seats that will be assigned two-year terms in the 2012 election. The remaining seats are assigned four-year terms.

Senate District 2010 senatorial election? Incumbent
1 No Malama Solomon
3 No Josh Green
5 No Roz Baker
6 No Kalani English
12 No Brickwood Galuteria
16 No David Ige
17 No Michelle Kidani
18 No Clarence Nishihara
21 No Maile Shimabukuro
22 Yes Donovan Dela Cruz
23 No Clayton Hee
24 Yes Jill Tokuda

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