By a landslide, Colorado voters decided in 2018 to overhaul the state’s once-a-decade redistricting process. The goal: finally putting an end to the partisan bloodsport known as gerrymandering.

Now, the responsibility falls on the same voters to ensure that the reforms work as planned.

This month, the state began accepting applications to serve on the new independent commissions tasked with approving the legislative maps for Congress and the Colorado General Assembly. And in a significant break from decades past, the two major parties won’t have much of a say in who gets chosen.

The hope is that the revamped process will lead to “regular people choosing their politicians rather than politicians choosing their people, says Amanda Gonzalez, executive director of Colorado Common Cause, a group that advocates for government accountability, “You don’t have the people who are trying to gain power drawing the maps.”

Kent Thiry, the former DaVita CEO and a major proponent of Amendment Y and Z in 2018, the measures that created the commissions, said Colorado voters were “fed up with the games, the gridlock, and the partisanship of politics.”

“That’s why we ended partisan gerrymandering — the process that determines how our democracy operates,” he added.

Read more at ColoradoSun.com.