We are all familiar with the process of the decennial census, mandated by Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution. The enumeration of the United States population is used, among other things, to apportion seats in the House of Representatives among the 50 states. We may remember that the loss of (productive) population in places like California and New York has caused those states to lose House seats since the 2020 tally.
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Now a House of Representatives inquiry into the conduct of the census reveals that miscounts in that tally may have been hiding that the loss in blue states may have been underestimated; the Census Bureau has apparently miscounted in many areas, and oddly enough, the miscounts always seem to favor Democrats.
A key House committee has begun an investigation into Census Bureau overcounts and undercounts that favor Democrats in awarding congressional apportionment and Electoral College votes.
House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., wrote Census Bureau Director Robert Santos on Wednesday to inquire about its communications about the overcounts and undercounts of state populations with the Biden-Harris administration and its Commerce Department, which includes the bureau.
After the 2020 census, the Census Bureau’s 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey, or PES, released the following year identified significant errors in the counts.
These significant errors show a distinct trend. Here’s the onion:
“The 2020 PES identified statistically significant overcounts in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Delaware, Minnesota, Utah, and Ohio, while finding undercounts in states like Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Illinois,” he wrote. “Of the eight states overcounted in the 2020 census, six states have typically voted for electors for the Democratic Party candidate in presidential elections for the last three decades.”
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Feature, or bug?
The first layer of this stinker is the areas that were overcounted and undercounted. Six of the eight states overcounted were Democrat bastions, including New York, which lost one House seat in reapportionment. It’s not clear that had the count been accurate, New York may have lost an additional seat, but that’s not the point. The undercount, by the way, hit Republican states harder, with five of the six states named as undercounted (Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee) being either Republican or at least Republican-leaning.
Here’s the core of the onion; in his letter, Rep. Comer concludes:
Of the six states undercounted in the 2020 census, all but one have tended to vote for electors for the Republican Party candidate in elections over the same time period. Because of the 2020 census’s failure to accurately count, Colorado gained a seat it did not deserve, Rhode Island and Minnesota kept seats they should have lost, and Texas and Florida were not awarded seats they should have gained.
It’s important to note that no similar miscount is documented from the 2010 census.
Consider what Rep. Comer’s conclusion means. This has tipped the current razor-thin balance of the House of Representatives, awarding the Democrats three seats they should not have, and costing the Republicans two safe seats (we can hope, depending of course on redistricting) that they should have gained.
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Incompetence? Or intentional?
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It’s six years until the next census, when we may see more reapportionment and more seats lost and gained by individual states. That’s six years to fix whatever went wrong in the 2020 census. That will likely take more action than Rep. Comer’s strongly worded letter. But part of the purpose of that letter is to document a demand for more documentation from the Census Bureau; it will be interesting to see what, if any, new information on these miscounts comes to light.
You can see Rep. Comer’s letter to the Census Bureau Director in its entirety here.
