Once every 10 years, politicians have the deck shuffled.

The cards they hold are snatched away and replaced with new ones. It is called reapportionment.

Using the information from the just-concluded, once-a- decade national census, all political districts are balanced to make each roughly reflect the same number of voters. Remember that stuff about one person one vote from civics class?

Politicians care about reapportionment because they want to run in areas where their friends live, and they would like their enemies to run in areas that either don’t like them or, at least, have never heard of them.

This once-a-decade political event is scheduled to finish up next week, and the folks who make the rules have been designing new maps to say where everyone runs from.

No, if you usually run from Kalihi you won’t be switched to Kahala, but just moving a district from the mauka to makai side of Beretania Street can determine whether you are keeping your political post.

Here’s the interesting thing this year. The people who usually design the maps, both Republicans and Democrats, have been doing it for decades; they know how to do it while rarely ever changing the existing power structure. This is one reason why the same folks usually are always in office.

But this year, a mostly apolitical Kailua Neighborhood Board chairman, Bill Hicks, who is a Naval Academy graduate and former U.S. Navy submarine commander, essentially said he could come up with a better plan, if you care about one person one vote.

You can’t balance it out exactly. The U.S. Supreme Court says 10% deviation is acceptable, so observers were shocked to see Hicks come up with a plan with 2% deviation when the experts were looking at 8%.

Sandy Ma, Common Cause executive director, and Neil Abercrombie, former governor and long-serving Democratic congressman, both point to the Hicks reapportionment plan as an example of volunteer citizen involvement that gets it right.

“I don’t know him well or long but he has been excellent with mobilizing and organizing the Windward community around the importance of redistricting, ” Ma said in an interview.

“He understands that fair reapportionment and redistricting are the foundations of our democracy.

“He has definitely helped with the process, especially in advocating for the community and explaining the importance of this wonky issue to the community.”

Abercrombie, who is usually best on the attack, is glowing in his praise of Hicks and his reapportionment plan.

“He’s completely straightforward, understands what the facts are, states them clearly and precisely, and it is very, very persuasive … He hasn’t the slightest practical ambition of running for office or of seeking some kind of a political advantage,” Abercrombie added, calling Hicks “a great collaborator … he is just following the Constitutional requirements.”

I know nothing about serving on submarines or being in charge of more than 100 men and women prowling 300 feet underwater for weeks at a time while tending to atomic weapons and a nuclear reactor, but I think it would develop the skills needed to learn how to get your way while still knowing how to play well with others. Hicks apparently has transferred those skills to the arcane balancing act of Hawaii’s political future.

It is never likely that political appointees rise above the common mean, but in this era of health, economic and environmental crises, it would be good to get it right for once.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.