A legislative redistricting plan being offered by a panel of former N.C. judges deserves attention and support. It could help bring an end to gerrymandering and the sharp political divisions that plague our country.

The effort is being led by former judge and UNC system president Tom Ross, now a Terry Sanford distinguished fellow at Duke. He was joined by colleagues and former state Supreme Court chief justices Henry Frye of Greensboro — a native of Ellerbe — and Rhoda Billings for a panel discussion last week in Greensboro, Joe Gamm of the News & Record reported. They’ve created a redistricting map by laying out districts without taking politics into consideration.

“Nonpartisan redistricting is the key to solving the most-broken aspects of our political system,” Ross said during the discussion. “If we’re not going to step up and fight for democracy, we’re going to lose it.”

They used four criteria to make their map: make districts compact, keep them contiguous, follow state and federal law and ignore all political factors, including voter registration, voter turnout, past election results and residence of incumbents and challengers.

Under existing maps, Republicans handily won 10 of the state’s 13 congressional districts in 2016. The winner of the closest race had 58 percent of the vote. When Democrats controlled the maps, they often handily won.

But under the districting model the panel configured, Republicans would have won six, Democrats four and the other three would have been tossups. And the races would have been much closer, Ross said.

They checked their final map to see if it complied with the Voting Rights Act, which takes racial demographics into consideration.

“What was interesting,” Billings said, “was how little time we had to put this together.”

She said they put the map together in about four hours.

“It’s really not all that hard if you’re not trying to gerrymander,” she told listeners, who burst into applause, the N&O reported.

Good government starts with fair elections and the ability to hold elected officials accountable. Gerrymandering effectively allows legislators to select their own voters, which then allows them to stay in office. Many candidates run without opposition because their districts aren’t competitive.

With this guaranteed power comes less willingness to compromise and solicit buy-in from the other side. As a result, candidates are being pushed further to the extreme sides of their parties, Ross said.

Fifty-nine percent of N.C. voters favor nonpartisan redistricting, compared with 15 percent who oppose it, Ross said.

A 2014 Washington Post report called gerrymandering “crimes against geography” and cited three of North Carolina’s districts — the 12th, the 4th and the 1st — among the top 10 worst in the country.

Republicans may see little advantage to a nonpartisan redistricting plan, but the pendulum swings both ways. If Democrats regain power, they will get to draw the maps. And Democrats are “really good at gerrymandering, too,” Ross said during the discussion.

A nonpartisan plan is better for both parties — and for voters.

— The Winston-Salem Journal