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Over the course of an hour, Hawaii’s Supreme Court justices picked apart the work done over five months by the state Reapportionment Commission.

The high court on Wednesday heard arguments over two lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the commission’s plan, which includes counting some non-resident military and college students as residents for determining Hawaii’s political boundaries.

While the justices didn’t make a decision Wednesday, they did question the constitutionality of the plan. Hawaii’s that reapportionment and redistricting be based on the state’s permanent resident population.

The court asked the attorneys their views on various alternative plans that exclude active-duty military, their dependents, and out-of-state college students from the population base.

The lawsuits contend that if the plan had excluded these non-permanent residents, the Big Island would likely gain an additional Senate seat due to population growth over the past decade. Instead, the current plan maintains the existing number of Senate and House seats for each island unit.

Hilo attorney Stanley Roehrig, representing Big Island Sen. Malama Solomon and three other Democrats, recommends excluding about 120,000 non-permanent residents.

The existing plan only excludes 16,458 active-duty military and out-of-state college students. That’s even though there are 47,000 active-duty military personnel in Hawaii who claim a home state other than Hawaii.

“The work done by the reapportionment staff indicates that all you have to do is extract 20,094 to shift one Senate seat over to the Big Island,” Associate Justice Simeon Acoba Jr. said. “If we agree that 47,000 people indisputably are non-resident military, just accepting that figure alone would shift a seat.”

Chief Justice Mark Recktenwald asked the deputy attorney general representing Gov. Neil Abercrombie what the governor’s position is on how many people should be excluded. The governor opposes the plan but has been named as a defendant in the lawsuits.

“The governor’s position is that there is error in the final reapportionment plan for 2012,” deputy attorney general Charlene Aina said. “That error is significant, and the court has extraordinary power to order relief to correct those errors.”

She noted that the existing plan as well as two alternate plans the commission prepared do not go far enough.

“It has to be more than any of those three (plans),” Aina said. “One-hundred twenty-thousand appears to be the most accurate at this point.”

The commission’s attorney, Russell Suzuki, also from the attorney general’s office, said the commission felt there was no accurate way to separate non-resident military and students from the general population based on where they live, as has been done in previous years.

Suzuki said the commission misunderstood the process, saying “the commission looked at reapportionment and redistricting as one process,” rather than a two-step process.

Victoria Marks, who chaired the Reapportionment Commission, said afterward that Suzuki’s statement was “completely erroneous.”

“We understood completely,” she said. “I wish the lawyer representing the commission had understood the record better.”

She said she trusts the court will make the right decision.

“Whatever the court decides, we’ll do it.”

The court is working against a February deadline when state elections officials will have to have final boundaries so that political candidates can begin filing for office.