RALEIGH – As a longtime advocate of redistricting reform, I urge all other adherents of reform – be they the newly converted or longtime apostles – to look closely at what is happening in other states.

As previously argued, the main problem with today’s redistricting system is the absence of clear, comprehensive, enforceable rules that work against partisan interest or incumbency protection. If such rules as geographical compactness and respect for local jurisdictions are clearly spelled out – and violations of those rules can land a prospective line-drawer in court – then it matters a bit less who that prospective line-drawer may be.

Still, the identity of those who draw legislative and congressional maps is an important issue. The ideal model for redistricting reform would marry a set of clear, comprehensive, enforceable rules with a balanced panel whose job is to apply those rules to specific sets of maps and population data.

When California voters approved a redistricting-reform initiative in 2008, drafters of the initiative thought they had constructed a sufficiently fair – meaning sufficiently complex – system for selecting the 14 members of its redistricting commission. Political candidates, party officials, large-scale donors, and lobbyists were excluded from the pool of potential commissioners. From thousands of applicants, the state auditor then selected 20 Democrats, 20 Republicans, and 20 independents as finalists.

Legislative leaders from both parties were then given the opportunity to strike names from the finalist pool. Of the remaining finalists, eight were selected at random. They, in turn, selected six more from the finalist pool to create the 14-member commission. It included five Ds, five Rs, and 4 Is.

But after the new California maps came up, both Republicans and Hispanics in the state went ballistic. Not only did they see the maps as disadvantageous to their respective interests, but they also argued that the process for selecting commissioners had been flawed – that it had not truly ensured fairness and excluded self-interested political operators.

In Arizona, disaffected Republicans argued that partisan bias crept in when its commission hired a mapmaking consultant with ties to the 2008 Obama campaign. They also pointed out that while the chairwoman of the commission was a registered independent, her husband had recently served as campaign treasurer for a Democratic legislative candidate. Gov. Jan Brewer and Republican lawmakers went so far as to impeach the chairwoman, but she was reinstated by the state supreme court.

Democrats in both states have rushed to defend the process. I lack the information necessary to reach firm conclusions about competing political claims in faraway states. What I do know is that if North Carolina had adopted redistricting reform prior to the 2010 elections, thus presenting a new commission or staff panel with the job of drawing legislative and congressional maps earlier this year, anyone who saw the results as injurious to their political interests would likely have lodged similar charges – and they probably wouldn’t have been easy to laugh off.

After all, if North Carolina had adopted the model of a Democrat-Republican-independent commission, it is likely that someone on that commission – and not necessarily one of the Democrats or Republicans – would have family, business, or personal ties with a current or past North Carolina politician.

And if North Carolina had adopted a staff-driven model like that of Iowa, it would have likely put staffers hired by the previous Democratic leaders of the General Assembly in charge of drawing the maps. However professional they were, and however fair they tried to be, one side or the other would have cried foul. If Republicans were disappointed with the resulting maps, they would have pointed to the staffers’ past relationships and loyalties. If the Democrats were disappointed, they would have argued that the staffers were loath to anger their new bosses.

I still support a commission system for implementing a reformed redistributing process. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that such a change will end partisan rancor. The best we can hope for is to limit as much as possible the discretion that any redistricting authority has.

That means automatic, mathematical decision rules as much as possible. And it means getting clear guidance from the courts about the modern meaning of the Voting Rights Act. On both matters, substantial disagreements remain.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.