Congressional Republicans called for an overhaul of Census Bureau procedures before the next count is due, saying the agency ran the 2020 version with “fake” people and shifted power away from GOP-leaning states by undercounting their population.
Republicans also renewed their pitch for the 2030 census to ask about citizenship and for the government to apportion congressional seats without including illegal immigrants in the population.
Rep. Chip Roy, Texas Republican, said counting migrants in 2020 benefited those states that welcome unauthorized people through their protective policies that thwart federal immigration enforcement.
“The 2020 census should be called the sanctuary census,” Mr. Roy said in kicking off Wednesday’s hearing in the House Judiciary Committee’s Constitution subcommittee.
He said if only a count of citizens were used to dole out U.S. House seats, it would shift 10 to 12 seats from Democrats to Republicans.
The hearing came days after President Trump took to social media to call the 2020 count “rigged.”
It raised questions about the way the 2020 count was done and about the bigger philosophical and legal issues involved in who’s counted and for what purposes.
“The 2020 census was the most inaccurate in modern history,” said Joseph Wade Miller, senior adviser at the Center for Renewing America, a conservative outfit founded by Mr. Trump’s budget director, Russ Vought.
The Census Bureau’s own after-action report found undercounts in six states, most of which are GOP-led, and overcounts in eight states, most of which are controlled by Democrats, shifting a half-dozen seats in favor of Democrats.
Miller said voters could conclude that the 2020 count “was weaponized, if not intentionally, through malpractice.”
A data tool the bureau used, known as differential privacy, took the brunt of criticism on Wednesday.
It’s a way of trying to shape data so it protects individual respondents from being identified through their answers while maintaining some integrity of the overall data. The bureau intentionally added “noise,” or wrong information, to its data at lower geographic levels.
Witnesses said it distorted every census number below the state totals.
“It adds fake people where they do not live, and subtracts real people from where they do live,” said Trey Mayfield, who was a lawyer for the census director in the first Trump administration.
He said that in Virginia, for example, the count wrongly inflated the population of Port Royal by 87% and cut the population of Stony Creek by 43%.
Mr. Mayfield, while criticizing differential privacy, said the census does have a tough time trying to reach some residents, such as homeless people. He defended some post-count modeling efforts as necessary.
That irked Rep. Tom McClintock, California Republican.
“If you can’t find them, you don’t make them up. That’s not science; that’s guesswork,” he said.
Democrats, for their part, denounced the hearing as an affront to immigrants and a bid for partisan advantage in Congress.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, Maryland Democrat, challenged Mr. Trump’s claims of malfeasance in the 2020 count, saying the Government Accountability Office concluded the tally was in line with previous iterations.
“The census was not rigged,” Mr. Raskin said.
John Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said the 2020 national count was good but that problems emerged within the data. He said children under 4 were undercounted by at least 5%, rural areas were undercounted by 4%, and Hispanic, Black and American Indian residents were undercounted too.
He criticized the push for a citizenship question on the census, saying it would cause fewer people to respond and distort the data. Asked if it was a “threat to democracy,” he said it “could be.”
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, Pennsylvania Democrat, said it’s a problem in the current environment when the administration is “actively engaged in hostility toward immigrants.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, countered that the decennial census asked about citizenship for 150 years, up through the middle of the 20th century. The question was then moved to a different census product that goes to fewer households.
“We’ve done it for most of our history, everyone thinks we’re doing it, everyone thinks we should do it — except for Democrats in Congress,” he said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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