The Pennsylvania House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that would loosen restrictions on poll watchers, reviving an issue that dominated the waning weeks of last year’s presidential election.

The bill’s author, Rep. Rick Saccone, R-Allegheny, has framed the measure as focused on improving Pennsylvania’s elections. But that’s a thin argument that fails the smell test. The problem isn’t state rules governing poll watchers, it’s the state’s gerrymandered congressional voting districts.

Poll watching is a healthy democratic tradition — if it’s done correctly. But in the current political climate it also has the potential to become a powder keg. And that’s clearly what this rule change, which would allow watchers from anywhere in the state to serve in any voting district, is intended to act as: a disruptive force in future elections.

In 2011 the Republican party gerrymandered Pennsylvania’s congressional voting districts so heavily that the state has been identified by both Princeton University and the New York-based Brennan Center as one of three with maps that show “extreme levels of partisan bias.”

The League of Women Voters, not known as an organization prone to partisan bomb-throwing, filed a lawsuit in June asking the Commonwealth Court to throw the maps out, calling them “unresponsive to the will of the people.”

Now the Republicans in the state House complain that some of those same districts don’t contain enough Republican voters for the party to find the poll watchers it needs on election day.

Wasn’t that exactly the point when legislators were carving out districts like the Seventh Congressional District, which is so convoluted it resembles Goofy kicking Donald Duck?

Mission accomplished; but Saccone and Republicans in the state House and Senate can’t have their cake and eat it too.

They don’t get to exploit redistricting and then use the poorly-drawn voting maps they created to argue that the party should be allowed to send operatives from anywhere in the state to disrupt the polls in overwhelmingly Democratic districts.

There’s a case to be made that Pennsylvania’s rules — which require poll watchers to be registered voters in the county where they serve — are too restrictive.

But those rules aren’t the reason the party can’t currently find registered Republicans in some districts. They can’t find the voters because legislators deliberately drew a voting map that consolidated reliably Republican municipalities and created noncompetitive voting districts that protected the party’s historic majorities in the General Assembly.

If Saccone and Republicans in the House were really concerned about “good government” initiatives, they would address the root cause of this issue.

A shortage of poll watchers is simply a symptom of the larger problem.