On the island of maui, residents voted to ban the cultivation of genetically engineered crops, but courts ruled the ban invalid. what might have underpinned residents' resistance to consuming gmo products?

There are many reasons for this. There are a lot of foods that are contaminated with chemicals and whose seeds were created in test tubes instead of by nature. This naturally makes people skeptical of what the GMO food could be made of and whether it would be harmful to them in any way. In addition, modern GMO food has not been around for a long enough time to see how it effects human health so that's another thing that underpins it.

The answer is crop yield.