OPINION:
Once Congress figures out how to pass a budget, fixing the census must come next on the priority list. The 2020 population count was rigged in a way that handed the Democratic Party six congressional seats it doesn’t deserve. That matters when control of the House is three seats away from changing from red to blue.
In a report compiled during President Biden’s administration, the Census Bureau acknowledged that six states were undercounted in 2020 and eight were overcounted. We’re just supposed to believe it was a coincidence that Mr. Biden’s allies were the beneficiaries in almost every instance.
The Heritage Foundation evaluated the impact of these errors and found the biggest winners, in order, were New York, Minnesota, Ohio, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Utah, Delaware and Rhode Island. The big losers were Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Illinois, Arkansas and Mississippi.
Had the tally been performed honestly, the Sunshine State would have picked up two additional representatives and the Lone Star State would add another likely Republican to its delegation. On the Democrat side, Colorado retained a district it should have lost, while Minnesota and Rhode Island each profited by one seat. Overall, Democrats gained six House seats and six votes in the Electoral College.
Sen. Jim Banks last week asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to investigate the shenanigans. “The integrity of the American political system depends on knowing exactly how many people are in each state — and each voting district. In the past, the Census Bureau has gotten those numbers right without statistically significant errors,” the Indiana Republican wrote.
Under the guise of COVID-19, census bureaucrats decided it was too dangerous to do their constitutionally mandated job. The agency replaced old-fashioned techniques with estimates of population totals and opaque statistical modeling. One gimmick, called “group quarters imputation,” made flimsy assumptions about the number of citizens living in old folks’ homes to avoid sending a surveyor to find out firsthand.
This is not something the agency is allowed to do. The Constitution requires an “actual enumeration” of the “whole number of free persons” every 10 years, not a guestimate maximizing the inclusion of illegal aliens that the prior administration let into the country by the millions.
The Census Bureau even had a method called “differential privacy” that formalized the publication of fraudulent information. As Mr. Banks explains, this means “randomly changing some correct demographic data into false demographic data in order to make it impossible to guess individual residents’ identities within a census block.”
America First Legal recently filed a lawsuit hoping a federal judge will overturn the 2020 census result and order a do-over without the statistical sampling.
Despite claims that the bureau lacked the resources to conduct a suitable tabulation, it nonetheless had plenty of cash to blow on useless surveys. In May, the Department of Government Efficiency canceled $2.2 billion in projects revolving around questions such as, “In your entire life, have you had at least 12 drinks of any kind of alcohol, not counting small tastes or sips?” And, “How frequently do you use the internet in your home?”
President Trump backs major reform. In August, he directed the Census Bureau to work on a “new and highly accurate” census that excludes foreign intruders from congressional apportionment. Democrats are enjoying the fruits of a flawed process that denied proper representation to rural areas.
That mistake must be corrected.
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