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LOUISVILLE (AP) - Kentucky lawmakers say a judge overstepped his authority in throwing out recently enacted legislative district maps and asked an appeals court Monday to reinstate the maps.

In documents filed with the Kentucky Court of Appeals, the Legislative Research Commission said Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd effectively drew a new map when he threw out the bill that set the new lines for the 2012 elections. The lawmakers say drawing districts is a power reserved solely for them.

Shepherd ruled the new districts are out of balance and needed to be redrawn to comply with the "one person, one vote" mandate in federal and state law.

"While adherence to one person, one vote presents a justiciable controversy, the actual drawing of the lines in an apportionment plan is a quintessential political question," wrote Sheryl Snyder, an attorney for the LRC.

Snyder also asked the appeals court to pass the case directly to the Kentucky Supreme Court. As of Monday afternoon, no appeal had been filed with the state's highest court.

Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes has not yet decided how to handle the appeal, spokeswoman Lynn Zellen said.

Drawing the new lines consumed more than a month of the legislative session. Unhappy with the outcome of the redistricting battle, House Republicans sued in January challenging the constitutionality of the new boundaries. A Senate Democrat displaced in the redistricting process joined the lawsuit, which contends that the new districts could have been better balanced by population and redrawn in such a way that fewer counties would have been split among districts.

Snyder argued that the new districts comply with population requirements set by federal law and earlier court rulings, while the old districts did not.

The new legislative districts produced some oddly shaped boundaries. The 89th House District stretches from the Tennessee line in McCreary County, zigzags narrowly through Laurel County, then encompasses all of Jackson County for a geographic setup that one lawmaker said would require an airplane for travel. One Senate district stretches from Barbourville to Morehead.

Redistricting occurs every 10 years to account for population changes reported in the U.S. Census. The latest count found that the state's overall population grew from 4 million to 4.3 million from 2000 to 2010, forcing new legislative and congressional district boundaries to be drawn. At each level of government - state House, Senate and Congress - the districts must be of nearly equal size.

Shepherd's ruling barred Grimes from recognizing the redrawn districts and restored old boundaries. That move forced several lawmakers who are up for re-election this year to file candidacy papers in districts that had been in place for the past decade.

Kentucky is one of at least 25 states with pending court cases involving redistricting. A similar Kentucky lawsuit filed after the 1990 census established some of the case law that House Republicans reference in their challenge.

On Friday, the legislature passed and Gov. Steve Beshear signed a new map for the state's six Congressional districts.

(Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)