Redistricting is supposed to be an orderly process where congressional and legislative districts are redrawn every 10 years to reflect population changes since the last census.

In reality, they’re the ultimate in political fun and games – partisanship in its purest, rawest form. That was true way back when Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry lost a re-election bid in 1812 because voters were outraged by his redistricting plan, one that included a district so oddly shaped it was compared to a salamander – the origin of the operative word, “gerrymander.”

Politicians have been gerrymandering ever since, though few have paid a similar price. In Texas, Republicans won the Legislature in 2003 and decided to redo the redistricting Democrats had done, according to constitutional rules, a year earlier. Tom DeLay, the later disgraced U.S. House majority leader, led the effort, and – as it turns out – nothing in federal law prevents re-redistricting. It worked, too. Republicans picked up six congressional seats and have been dominant in Texas ever since, as the current presidential bid of Gov. Rick Perry attests.

In Maine, the shenanigans are less brazen, but not necessarily less calculated. The advent of computer-generated maps has led to districts even Gov. Gerry might balk at.

The current battle over Maine’s two congressional districts promises an interesting sideshow, as Democrats and the newly empowered Republicans present their maps.

Democrats, now in the minority, still recall their past triumphs, keeping things about the same. The 2010 census showed a net shift of about 4,700 voters to the 1st District (southern Maine) from the 2nd (the geographically huge rest of the state). To fix that minor discrepancy, Democrats would move Vassalboro, just about that size, from the 1st to the 2nd District. Ten years earlier, China, also in Kennebec County, made the same shift.

Republicans, meanwhile, would tear up the existing map and give us two entirely new districts. The shifts involve 300,000 Mainers.

All of Lincoln, Knox, and Sagadahoc counties would move from the 1st District to the 2nd, while Oxford and Androscoggin counties would move in the opposite direction. Franklin County would be split, while all of Kennebec would be rerouted to the 2nd District.

What would this electoral mayhem accomplish? The Democratic plan would leave an 11-vote difference between the two districts, which each have more than 650,000 people. The Republican plan shaves that to one vote.

This may seem like swatting a gnat with a sledgehammer – moving 300,000 voters to make up a 10-vote difference — but the GOP has hopes that the Maine Supreme Judicial Court will admire its handiwork, as it did once before.

The court often decides redistricting fights in Maine. Under the state constitution, it acts when the Legislature can’t achieve a two-thirds vote. That may be the case again this year.

In 1994 the court, rather than splitting the difference between the party plans for the House of Representatives, its usual practice, instead adopted the Republican version. Some read this as a rebuke to then-House Speaker John Martin, but the justices officially cited the numerical perfection of the Republican plan which, by a tiny margin, provided closer-to-equal districts. It also forced half a dozen Democratic incumbents into primaries against each other, doubtless playing a role in the GOP’s big gains that year.

Judging by initial reactions, that’s the verdict about this year’s GOP congressional plan, too. It would put both of Maine’s current representatives, Chellie Pingree and Mike Michaud, in the 2nd District. But that can’t be the motive.

Unlike legislators, congressmen aren’t required to live in their districts (many live in Washington) and Pingree, from North Haven, also has a Portland residence that would remain well inside the 1st District.

Others noticed the wholesale changes would create a net shift of 8,600 registered Republicans to the 2nd District. That would be a classic gerrymander – the GOP has written off the 1st District as unwinnable, but wants to regain the 2nd.

As Senate President Kevin Raye, R-Perry, winds up his legislative career, he’s set to run for Congress again. Once Sen. Olympia Snowe’s chief of staff, he just missed beating Michaud for an open seat in 2002, then won a state Senate seat two years later, where he’s now term-limited.

Whatever the outcome, we’ll do it again two years hence. The GOP-inspired federal lawsuit that led to congressional redistricting two years before the state constitutional date doesn’t apply to legislative elections. So the inordinate time and effort spent on redistricting will now be spread over two legislative sessions. If politics resembles sausage-making, as it often does, we’re in for a lot of it.