Independent Redistricting Commissions: Central Planning for Your Vote

Every ten years, after the census, Americans confront the oldest political question in a republic: who draws the lines that decide which voters elect which representatives? The fashionable answer today is the "independent redistricting commission." It sounds scientific, nonpartisan, above politics. But strip away the branding and what you have is central planning for representation-an unelected body whose real independence is from the voters, not from politics.

The Constitution answers the "who" question directly. Article I, Section 4 says that the times, places and manner of holding elections for Congress "shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof." That word-Legislature-was not a slip. It names the branch that is elected, assembled, and answerable to the people. The Founders put redistricting there for the same reason they built a republic of laws, not men: accountability. In Federalist 51, Madison wrote that "a dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government." A legislature that draws a map must face the voters who live under that map. An independent commission does not.

In 2015, the Supreme Court allowed Arizona to transfer congressional redistricting from its legislature to an "independent" commission. The four Justices who dissented-led by Chief Justice Roberts and joined by Justice Scalia-read the text as written. They were right. If you want to change the Constitution's allocation of election power, amend it. Don't reinterpret it.

But leave constitutional text aside for a moment, because the commission model fails on its own terms.

"Independent" Is a Political Label, Not a Fact

Someone has to write the law that creates the commission. Someone has to choose the applicant pool, design the selection process, and pick the "nonpartisan" staff and lawyers who will actually draw the lines. Every one of those choices is a political act.

The criteria the commission follows are equally plastic. Words like "compactness," "contiguity," and "communities of interest" sound neutral, but they contain enormous discretion. What is a community of interest? A neighborhood? A media market? A partisan coalition? A racial bloc? The answer determines the map, and the answer will be supplied by the people with power over the process. Strip away the word "independent" and you have a political contest hidden behind bureaucratese. The politics does not disappear. It moves one level down, out of public view.

Consider how these commissions actually work in practice. Most are created by ballot initiative or statute. Applicants submit forms, often through a state auditor or a panel of judges. Legislative leaders from both parties can usually strike names from the pool. The final commission is balanced by party registration, with a few unaffiliated members. California uses fourteen commissioners chosen from a screened pool; Michigan randomly selects thirteen registered voters. Neither state lets those final commissioners stand for election on the map they produce.

But party registration is a poor proxy for ideology, and the real decisions are often made by staff, consultants, and mapping lawyers whom the commission hires. Those people answer to the commission. The commission answers to no one.

A legislator drawing a district has a clear conflict of interest, yes-but also a clear line of accountability. The voters in that district can vote him out. An independent commissioner typically serves for one cycle, cannot run for office, and then dissolves. If the map is unaccountable to the voters, whom do the voters punish? Nobody. The commission disappears. The staff moves on. The consultants get paid. There is no next election in which the map-drawer answers for the map.

The Knowledge Problem at the Ballot Box

Here is the angle most critics miss: redistricting is not a technical exercise that can be handed to planners. It is a knowledge problem in the Hayekian sense. The information needed to draw districts that actually reflect communities-local economies, school boundaries, parish lines, traffic patterns, shared history, family ties-is dispersed across millions of citizens. No commission of fourteen amateurs, however well-intentioned, can gather that knowledge in a few months of public hearings. They will rely on mapping software, organized interest groups, and the preferences of staff. A mapping algorithm is not a neighborhood. A consultant's demographic model is not a community.

Hayek's insight about central planning was that the planner can never possess the dispersed knowledge that ordinary people use every day. The same is true for redistricting. The more a commission tries to impose a clean, formulaic map from above, the more it overrides the spontaneous, local order of community life. The result is often a map that looks orderly on paper but splits shoppers from their stores, farmers from their markets, parishioners from their churches-because the commissioners did not know those connections existed.

I have seen the results of this thinking. A compact district on a screen can divide a rural county where everyone shops in the same town, sends their children to the same schools, and worships in the same church. The line looks rational to a consultant in a state capital; it is senseless to the people who live there. A state legislator from that county would know better, because he drives those roads and attends those meetings. A commissioner four hundred miles away will not know unless an interest group tells him-and interest groups have their own agendas.

Incentives Matter More Than Intentions

I do not deny that partisan gerrymandering is real. Both parties have done it, and it is ugly. Elbridge Gerry gave his name to the salamander-shaped district in 1812, and the practice has never entirely gone away. But the solution is not to replace one set of political actors with another set that has even weaker incentives to serve voters.

Thomas Sowell has spent a career explaining that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The seen benefit of an independent commission is a map that looks less obviously partisan. The unseen cost is the loss of the only real discipline on districting: the ability of citizens to identify and remove the people responsible. In Henry Hazlitt's terms, we see the new commission; we do not see the accountability that is destroyed.

A legislator knows that if he draws a district that splits a community or protects him too obviously, he may pay for it at the next election. The threat of losing office is not a perfect check, but it is a real one. A commissioner has no next election. His name may not even be on the ballot. He does not live in most of the districts he draws, and he will not have to face the voters whose communities he carves up. That is not reform. That is the administrative state applied to the ballot itself.

The Real Reform Is Legal, Not Bureaucratic

If you want fairer maps, pass laws that require it-openly, in the legislature. Require single-member districts, equal population, contiguity, and compactness. Respect county and municipal boundaries. Prohibit the use of partisan election data as the predominant factor. Hold public hearings and publish the maps in advance. Then let courts enforce those rules, and let voters enforce the rest at the ballot box. That is republican government.

What we should not do is create a fourth branch that is answerable to no one and call it reform. That is not republicanism. It is central planning for your vote, run by people whose chief qualification is that they have been screened to be "nonpolitical" and therefore know less about politics than the citizens whose lines they draw.

Self-government is not a technical problem to be solved by experts. It is a moral and political responsibility to be exercised by citizens and their elected representatives. The moment we hand the drawing of districts to an unaccountable board, we admit that the people cannot be trusted to govern themselves. But a constitutional republic rests on the opposite premise: that free citizens, acting through their elected representatives, can govern themselves under law. The lines on a map matter because they decide who answers to whom. Let us keep the answer clear.

An independent redistricting commission is not independent. It is unaccountable. And in a republic, that is the one thing no government body is allowed to be.