By MIKE SCHNEIDER
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Two young Republican groups have challenged statistical methods used to produce the results of the 2020 census, four years after the numbers were released, as the GOP continues its growing attack on the numbers from the last U.S. head count.
The legal challenge, filed in a Florida federal court, targets the U.S. population figures that determine how many congressional seats each state gets. It comes as President Donald Trump has been pressuring Republican-led state legislatures to redraw their congressional districts to benefit the GOP ahead of next year’s elections.
Census and redistricting expert Jeffrey Wice said Friday that the Florida lawsuit was part of that strategy to keep the House of Representatives under Republican control.
“Clearly, this is part of that agenda to use the courts and state legislatures in any way they can to retain congressional power,” said Wice, a New York Law School professor. “It’s not a very great step forward.”
The University of South Florida College Republicans, the Pinellas County Young Republicans and two individuals on Tuesday filed a request for a three-judge panel to hear their lawsuit, as is required for cases involving the process of divvying up congressional seats among the states, known as apportionment. The request on Thursday was referred to the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs didn’t respond to an emailed question about the lawsuit, and neither did the Census Bureau or the U.S. Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau.
Some GOP elected officials in recent months have been calling for a mid-decade redo of the once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident. In August, Trump instructed the Commerce Department to have the Census Bureau start work on a new census that would exclude immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently blamed the Census Bureau for “shortchanging” Florida, saying the nation’s third most populous state deserved an extra seat in the House. Florida gained one additional House seat after the 2020 census, raising its total to 28. Unlike other states, Florida barely provided any resources for mobilizing residents to fill out census forms, and DeSantis brushed off early calls to form a state committee aimed at mobilizing participation.
In a letter to the Commerce Department this week, Sen. Jim Banks, R-Indiana, blamed one of the statistical methods for producing inaccurate totals and demanded the release of a file containing original, unaltered census data.
“The Biden (administration) used a shady ‘privacy’ formula that scrambled the data and miscounted 14 states,” Banks wrote in a social media post. “It included illegal immigrants and handed Democrats extra seats. Americans deserve a fair count and I’m fighting to fix it.”
Although the 2020 census numbers were released during the first months of Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration, the execution and final planning for the head count, including the decision to use the statistical methods, took place during Trump’s first term. The 14th Amendment says that “the whole number of persons in each state” are to be counted for the numbers used for apportionment, and the Census Bureau has interpreted that to mean anybody residing in the U.S., regardless of legal status. Federal courts have repeatedly supported that interpretation.
The methods that the lawsuit challenged were “differential privacy” and “imputation” for group quarters, which include college dorms, nursing homes and other places where people live together under one roof. Differential privacy adds intentional errors to the data to obscure the identity of any given participant in the 2020 census while still providing statistically valid information. Imputation is a process of using other information to fill in data about people when census-takers can’t reach anyone at a particular address.
The 2020 census faced unprecedented obstacles from the COVID-19 pandemic, hurricanes and wildfires, social unrest and efforts by the Trump administration to end the count early. Group quarters such as college dorms and nursing homes were especially challenging since campuses closed and care facilities restricted access in an effort to halt the spread of COVID-19.
The lawsuit describes imputation as a form of statistical sampling, which is prohibited for apportionment. But Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional staffer who consults on census issues, said Friday that “imputation is not sampling” and that differential privacy didn’t affect state population counts used to apportion congressional seats.
“Accuracy is the overarching goal,” Lowenthal said. “I’m not sure why there is a concerted effort among Republicans to diminish the accuracy of the census.”
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