ST. PAUL — Republican U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann says she will run for her old 6th District seat even though newly drawn congressional maps put her home in the 4th District.

Bachmann would face an eventual battle against Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum if she stays in the 4th. McCollum is a six-term incumbent.

Members of Congress don’t have to live in the district they represent, so Bachmann is free to run wherever she likes. She says she doesn’t know if she’ll establish a residence in the new 6th District.

The redistricting is done every 10 years to reflect population shifts.

Redistricting takes place once a decade, after the federal census, to reflect population shifts in congressional and legislative districts.

The state’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed new congressional and legislative redistricting maps in 2011, but Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton vetoed the plans. He said at the time he believed the GOP effort unfairly targeted Democratic incumbents and that he was only willing to sign redistricting proposals if they had bipartisan support.

The inability of Dayton and GOP lawmakers to agree on a political realignment threw the issue into the courts, where it has almost always landed in recent decades. Supreme Court Chief Justice Lorie Gildea appointed a panel of state judges to draw up new maps, and the group considered proposals from interested groups including both the state Democratic and Republican parties.

Dayton has said he believes the state’s current redistricting process is inefficient, and suggested taking it out of the legislative process altogether in favor of letting an independent panel handle it from the beginning. He said on Tuesday that doing so would probably result in an earlier setting of new political boundaries, giving both incumbent and aspiring politicians more than the roughly eight months they’ll now have to mount campaigns in new districts.

For state lawmakers who now live outside of their redrawn districts, they can move to get back into it no later than six months before the next general election date. This year’s election is Nov. 6, which means that legislators have until May 6 to establish residency in a new district.