The Legislature’s Redistricting Committee put on a great show. It invited public involvement. It convened hearings across the state and paid handsomely to put up an interactive website that allowed people to draw their own maps and submit them to the committee. But in the end, the Republican majority threw all pretense of an objective process away and served up gerrymandered hash, particularly in maps for the state’s four congressional seats and the Utah Senate. That wretched cynicism in the service of one-party rule helps explain why Utah voters don’t bother to go to the polls.

Why should they? Voters aren’t stupid. They know that the deck is stacked against change and for incumbents and the GOP. It happens not only in the way district maps are redrawn every 10 years, but in the way the party nominates its candidates through a caucus and convention process that awards power to extremists.

Voters tell pollsters that they don’t have time to go to the polls on election day, and who can blame them? In most races, voting is a waste of time.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If the right criteria were chosen, such as preserving municipal boundaries, making districts compact and preserving communities of interest, maps could be drawn that would better serve the republican ideal in addition to preserving the one-person, one-vote principle.

Boundaries should be drawn without reference to party affiliation or voting patterns or incumbency. But that outcome is unlikely so long as people who currently are in office are in charge of the process. That’s why Utahns should turn the job over to a commission.

To comply with the Utah Constitution, the commission would have to forward its recommendations to the Legislature, which would retain ultimate authority to adopt them. But instead, Utah has the Legislature’s Redistricting Committee. The first clue that the process might not turn out well came early, when the committee’s website did not include municipal boundaries. It’s hard to draw maps to respect those boundaries when you don’t know where they are. The committee also failed to adopt any metrics, suggested by some good government groups, that districts remain compact, such as measuring the length of their boundaries.

If the full Legislature adopts the committee’s recommended maps for congressional and state Senate seats in this week’s special session, it will confirm that, once again, the fix is in. And Utah’s voter turnout probably will remain one of the worst in the nation.