Gerrymandering reform may be a good idea, but the Freedom to Vote Act, which the Senate blocked in January, would have saddled state officials with unclear redistricting standards that would baffle sure compliance, while actively discouraging sound districting criteria such as compactness. By mandating use of complex models, it would have shifted power to costly expert consultants while making the line-drawing process opaque to the public, at best.

Under this bill, officials would have had to base redistricting plans on elaborate statistical models from statewide projections of “a range of reasonably foreseeable electoral conditions” over eight years. They could be sued for a misstep at almost any stage, and the rules would maximize plaintiffs’ leverage: Stays would be automatic, judges would lose discretion to order relatively undisruptive remedies such as one-time use of redistricting plans with minor flaws and so forth.

A presumption of illegality would have run against a statewide plan if its projected partisan outcomes fell outside a range of proportionality to recent Senate and presidential votes in the same state. Sample headache: GOP federal candidates regularly get a third of the vote in Massachusetts. So, Republicans would be entitled to three of the state’s nine House seats, right? But because most Bay State GOP voters live among Democratic neighbors, carving out three House seats for them is essentially impossible without use of heroically convoluted lines.

There is a respectable academic case for proportional representation. But why not do it directly, rather than by contorting geographic lines in wholly artificial ways? Tying partisan House outcomes to earlier Senate and presidential votes would create weird new incentives. Tempted to cross party lines to support an excellent Senate candidate from the other side? Watch out: doing that will tend to lower the number of future House seats your own party will be awarded. Yikes!

There is much more, including provisions on race that would have kept lawyers super busy. Thirty states presently mandate compact House districts. The word “compact” appears nowhere in the bill’s text; the nearest brush is a provision forbidding the use of such criteria as a defense. Twenty-nine states require respect for county and city lines. The congressional bill discourages that, too, specifying that although a long list of other factors can be deemed communities of interest, political subdivisions may qualify as such only “if the record warrants,” suggesting a need to particularize each evidentiary case.

We need redistricting reform, but that wasn’t it.