Next June will mark the 25th anniversary of the start of my professional journalism career.

I started my role as managing editor of the Independence (Iowa) Bulletin-Journal, where my office window looked over the Buchanan County Courthouse and the top government story was redrawing the state legislative districts.

A few weeks earlier, the Iowa Senate had rejected the Legislative Service Bureau’s first draft of maps for the 2022 elections. In a resolution explaining its reasons, the Senate requested improved population deviates to more closely reach the “one person, one vote” ideal, among other reasons. Lawmakers enacted the second plan June 22. And I’ve been writing about redistricting ever since.

The Iowa Legislature’s website contains voluminous information on old redistricting cycles (the 2001 data is at tinyurl.com/Iowa2001Maps), but it’s pretty easy to summarize the boundary-setting process for 50 state Senate and 100 House seats, along with the four U.S. House districts.

Starting with the 1980 Census, the Bureau, a nonpartisan redistricting service, develops up to three plans and submits them for legislative approval. The plans use the following criteria, in order of importance: population quality, contiguous borders, unity of counties and cities (which also keeps state House districts within state Senate districts and the state Senate districts within the Congressional districts) and compactness. The only demographic information allowed in the equation is population. No voting records, no registered party data, nothing.

In 1991, a Democrat-controlled assembly adopted a plan favoring Republicans, who eventually wrested control of both chambers. The 2001 plan referenced earlier forced incumbent Republicans to move to new districts to avoid competition for Congressional seats.

If you saved a quarter every time one of my subsequent columns used the word “gerrymandering,” you could buy gumballs for an entire grade school. So it’s unsurprising when readers email about Illinois’ deeply flawed process, or to see Friday’s Capitol News Illinois story about former U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and ex-Commerce Secretary Bill Daley leading a bipartisan group reanimating a 2016 constitutional amendment creating an independent mapping commission for our General Assembly districts.

As I’ve told readers suggesting examination of the push, of more value would be a nationwide solution dictating Congressional district boundaries because it has become untenable that so many states operate under different conditions. This is a complex stance given concerns about federal meddling in state issues, but the composition of Congress is crucial as federal offices affect everyone in increasingly outsized ways.

That’s also the logic behind repeated calls to revisit the size of Congress, unchanged for 100 years despite a population explosion and huge shifts in where Americans live.

Hopefully, I’m still writing for another 25 years … ideally with some material changes on this subject.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.