INDIANAPOLIS | The redrawing of Indiana's legislative boundaries is too important to leave to the politicians.
That's the idea behind the creation Friday of a Citizens Redistricting Commission that plans to crisscross the state over the next four months to get Hoosiers involved in the once-a-decade remap of the state's Congressional and General Assembly district lines.
"We think it's going to be a way to bring redistricting to the citizens, help demystify this process that, in the past, has happened behind closed doors and for political reasons first and foremost," said Julia Vaughan, policy director for Common Cause Indiana, a nonpartisan group that promotes open government and citizen participation.
The Citizens Redistricting Commission plans to hold public hearings, sponsor map-drawing contests for students and adults, and track the General Assembly's redistricting process to try to stop districts from being drawn to benefit a particular political party.
"It really does amount to politicians choosing their voters, rather than the voters choosing their politicians," Vaughan said.
To combat that gerrymandering, the citizens commission plans to make easy-to-use computer mapping software available to allow Hoosiers to draw their own maps and compare them with the maps proposed by the General Assembly.
The Constitution requires new districts to be drawn after the U.S. Census is taken every 10 years to ensure legislative districts are nearly equal in population. The sole criterion for drawing a district under Indiana law is that all parts of the district must be contiguous.