Have California’s citizen commissions killed corruption in congressional redistricting?

California’s 11^th congressional district is green and gently hilly, home to affluent East Bay suburbs like Danville and Dublin. It is also golden and craggy, encompassing a mountainous state park overlooking San Jose, two counties and 60 miles to the south. And it is flat, hazy, and redolent of manure, since it also snakes far into the agricultural Central Valley to take in cow towns like Tracy and Lodi. (Yes, that’s the same Lodi that Creedence Clearwater Revival was always getting stuck in.)

What’s odd about the district isn’t its size—it’s right around the median of the country’s 435 congressional districts in total land area. Rather, it’s the sprawling, three-tendril shape, which has been described as resembling a claw or a hammerhead shark. It also resembles a Rorschach inkblot, which is appropriate: Legislators look at it and see a perfectly valid congressional district, while the average citizen sees an abomination.

The problems with gerrymandered districts such as California’s 11^th seem obvious. Drawn by incumbents with the goal of protecting incumbency, they stifle competition, reward corruption, and can leave minorities underrepresented (or, in a few cases, overrepresented). In effect, they allow representatives to choose their voters, rather than the other way around.

After decades of throwing up their hands at state lawmakers’ redistricting shenanigans, California’s citizens recently took the process into their own hands. A proposition on the 2008 ballot set up an independent commission to draw new state legislative and congressional district boundaries following the 2010 census. After a thorough application process followed by a lottery, five Democrats, five Republicans, and four independents won the chance to spend hundreds of hours poring over census data and fielding public input in hopes of reshaping the Fightin’ 11^th and other, equally grotesque-looking districts up and down the state.

California isn’t alone in relieving its legislative foxes of their henhouse-guarding duties. Several other states, including Arizona, Hawaii, and New Jersey, have set up independent commissions to draw their district maps. Some have even invited members of the general public to try their hand, using online tools that allow you to see instantly how your changes will affect a district’s demographics. Students in a law seminar on redistricting at Columbia University have used geographic information system software to propose new maps for all 50 states. (You can try it yourself here and here.)

So have the new citizen-technocrats managed to cleanse the redistricting process of partisan politics and craven self-interest? Have their efforts been hailed far and wide for their fairness and rationality?

Not really, but that’s not for lack of merit.

In Arizona, whose commission comprises two Democrats, two Republicans, and one independent who serves as chair, the partisan members deadlocked and the independent broke the tie in favor of the Democrats’ plan. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer responded by impeaching the chair. (The state Supreme Court later reinstated her.)

California’s process avoided the tiebreaker pitfall by requiring bipartisan agreement among its commission members. Impressively, they achieved it, approving new maps unanimously. But that didn’t stop Republicans, and some minority groups, from crying foul. Republicans allege that three Southern California districts were rigged to protect Democratic incumbents; some Latinos have complained that the new maps don’t include enough Latino-majority districts. With no gerrymandering legislators to blame, Republicans resorted to criticizing a nonpartisan consultant from UC-Berkeley who helped draw the maps. (“I had never been called a ‘partisan hack’ in my life” before consulting on the redistricting project, the consultant, Karin Mac Donald, told me.) Republican activists filed two lawsuits challenging the redistricting plan in the state Supreme Court. After losing both, they recently reloaded with a new federal suit. Meanwhile, another group of Republicans has raised millions in a bid to put the new maps to a referendum.

As for the various state contests that invite average citizens to submit their own plans, they’ve proven to be mostly for show. No state has yet adopted an outsider’s plan, even though many have been objectively superior to the real maps on criteria such as competitiveness and compactness. A college student won a Michigan redistricting competition this summer with a computer-generated plan that is significantly cleaner than what the lawmakers in Lansing conjured. They ignored it, of course.