I’ve spent years in elections. I’ve watched voters stand in line, cast their ballots, and trust that their vote ensured that their political will mattered. That trust is the whole thing. Without it, we don’t have a republic. We have theater.

So let me say something that both parties hate hearing: gerrymandering is wrong. Full stop. And we all know it.

Here’s the part that really bothers me. When the party out of power gets gerrymandered, the outrage is loud and righteous. Maps get called unconstitutional. Lawmakers give floor speeches about fairness and the will of the people. Lawyers file suit. Op-eds get written.

Then that party wins a majority. They inherit the mapmaking pen. And suddenly the speeches stop.

Suddenly, “fairness” becomes a complicated concept. Suddenly, there are legitimate justifications, legal precedents and technical explanations for why the new maps look suspiciously like the old ones, just flipped.

Given enough time, the prevailing party will change. The hypocrisy doesn’t.

This is not a partisan observation. It is a human one. Power protects itself. That’s not new. What’s new is that we no longer have any excuse to let it.

We live in a world where you can instruct software to draw district lines that are compact, contiguous and genuinely blind to voter registration data or past election results. Independent redistricting commissions exist. They work. Iowa has used a nonpartisan process for decades and produces maps that don’t embarrass anyone. It can be done.

The argument that “the other side does it too” is the weakest possible defense of a bad practice. Yes, they do. That’s the problem. Two wrongs producing a system where most legislative races are decided in a primary, not a general election, where incumbents choose their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives. That is not democracy. That is not a representative republic. That is a lie we’ve grown comfortable telling ourselves.

If you believe in free and fair elections, you cannot carve out an exception for the map. In a sense, the map IS the election.

I’m not naive. I know that asking politicians to give up the power to draw their own districts is asking them to act against their own self-interest. That’s hard. But that’s also exactly what public service is supposed to require sometimes. Courage. Honesty. Putting the system above your seat.

Voters deserve districts that reflect communities, not calculations. They deserve real choices, real competition and real representation.

We have the tools to do this right. We’ve had them for years. What we’ve been missing is the honesty to admit the problem and the courage to fix it.

You either believe in fair elections, or you don’t. The map is where we find out.

• Joe Tirio is the elected McHenry County clerk and recorder and a candidate for reelection in November. A Republican, he previously spent more than 30 years in technology and operations leadership at Ameritech/AT&T, Abbott Laboratories and Aon Hewitt.