A comprehensive study just out today theorizes that as many as 14 congressional races and 17 state Assembly races might truly be competitive if the power to draw political maps is removed from the hands of the Legislature.

The study comes from the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. But while the authors say competition may be increased, more frequent turnover of lawmakers who hold those jobs may not.

You can read the report here.

"The ability to achieve a high level of potentially competitive seats," says the report, "is greatly limited" by factors that include the huge power of incumbent candidates-- like name recognition, campaign cash, etc.

This past fall, I visited the IGS offices for a story on the idea of making more races competitive-- a requirement that was not in Proposition 77, but was nonetheless a key selling point made in speeches by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. After sitting down at a specialized computer system for a couple of hours, I found that drawing competitive districts in California can be pretty hard. The main problem is that the partisan split is pretty deep in certain regions like the Bay Area and the LA region; balancing the (D) and (R) voters in those areas is not easy.

The IGS study says depending on the different map-drawing criteria used, elections for the U.S. House of Representatives would feature an average of 13 competitive races out of a total of 54-- where currently there are zero. And for the Assembly, the report calculates an average of 15 of the 80 races would be competitive.

And as I found from my own map-drawing experience, the IGS report seems to conclude that those often criticized meandering political districts drawn in odd shapes might actually be the only solution, if your goals are to increase competition and ensure that ethnic or racial minorities are properly represented in Washington and Sacramento.

"Plans that placed a heavy emphasis on compactness and minimizing city/county splits," says the report, "made it hard to achieve the political goals of more competitive seats and preserving majority minority requirements."