If Kevin Mannix, a former state lawmaker from Salem, were serious about a balanced method of redrawing legislative and congressional districts every 10 years, the initiative measure he hopes to put on the 2020 ballot would look very different.

There are far better and fairer ways to take redistricting away from lawmakers and place it in the hands of an independent commission. While Mannix would take the process out of the Democrat-dominated Legislature’s hands and deny Gov. Kate Brown, also a Democrat, an up or down vote on their product, he’d stack the deck on the other side.

Mannix would create an 11-member commission, with representatives chosen from counties or groups of counties. So far, so good. But his groups give far more weight to the sparsely populated Republican counties that make up much of the state outside Portland and the Willamette Valley. For instance, there would be one representative for the 66,331 residents in a group made up of Wasco, Sherman, Gilliam, Morrow, Jefferson and Crook counties, and there would be one representative for the 807,555 residents of Multnomah County.

Some states that have switched to redistricting commissions in an attempt to remove political party control of the redistricting process appear to have done a better job of reducing political influence. Arizona, California and Idaho do so by requiring equal representation from both major political parties, a system designed to give Republicans and Democrats equal say on redistricting in their states. Others give the courts greater power in shaping redistricting commissions.

There is no perfect way to keep politics out of the once-a-decade redistricting process, though several appear to be far better than what Mannix proposes.