City Journal link. Unfortunately, the results were anything but nonpartisan. The independent chair sided consistently with the two Democrats, essentially giving them control over the makeup of the congressional and state legislative maps.”
Get rid of “non partisan” redistricting commissions:
“So a decade ago, Arizona voters decided to end the partisanship by removing the redistricting process from the state legislature and placing it in the hands of an independent commission. Last year, the new commission, consisting of two Democrats, two Republicans, and a nonpartisan chair, got to work on its first set of maps after the 2010 census.
Didn’t work as advertised in California either:
” In 2008, for example, California’s Proposition 11 put state legislative redistricting in an independent commission’s hands; two years later, Proposition 20 gave the commission power over congressional redistricting as well. But Democrats hijacked the process, according to a series of investigative articles on the websites Calwatchdog and ProPublica.”
The role of Section 5 in the redistricting process leads to hyper-partisanship:
“To understand the full implications of racial gerrymandering, consider a state that lacks it: Iowa, which is 91 percent white and where no county has more than a 20 percent minority population. The state consequently doesn’t have to worry about drawing districts for the sake of electing minority representatives. Not coincidentally, Iowa also has the country’s most nonpartisan, nonpolitical redistricting process.”
Full article at link above.