A top Census Bureau official on Friday cleared up one mystery surrounding whether government data will be used to tilt electoral maps towards Republicans. Another mystery, however, remains when it comes to whether President Trump’s citizenship data project will be successful.
I’ve seen this statement frequently when talking about redistricting, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything about what exceptions currently do exist. What other methods do some states use and which states use them?
According to a copy of Abowd’s power point presentation obtained by TPM, the Census Bureau is giving itself until March 31, 2020, to announce “the specifications” of how the citizenship data will be released in 2021.
“No final decisions have been made regarding the methodology and format of the block-level CVAP data,” Abowd’s presentation said.
That’s a lie! The final decision has been made. It just has not been announced. They’re simply waiting to announce it until after there is no longer enough time for it to be successfully challenged in court before the 2020 election.
I’m sort of amazed that California Republicans in the rural farming counties aren’t fighting harder to count migrant fruit and vegetable pickers towards their own totals.
Bingo, 10,000 likes to truth. The judge will state that he agrees that the method is discriminatory but any objections should have been made long ago, now it is far to late to make any changes.
I’m hoping a lower court throws any such maps out pre-emptively while litigation is going on. It hasn’t even been officially claimed that CVAP is a lawful number.
Is it even constitutional for federal agencies to be co-opted and put to use for blatantly partisan political purposes? I thought the purpose and intent of our entire federal bureaucracy was to work on behalf of the entire country, and not just for Republicans.
Is this another instance of trying to solve a problem with a black Sharpie?
@tierney - I’m grateful for your continued investigations and reporting on this Republican ratfucking power grab of census data. Reading your pieces on the census over the last several months I’ve taken note of the highlighting you’ve done of this bold through-line from census-fuckery to redistricting-fuckery and ultimately disenfranchisement and sabotage the Republicans are doing to constitutionally defined representation. You are the reporter I turn to on this beat. Thank you!
Oh you silly boy/girl/gender non conforming person, when Republicans are in the Oval Office and control one chamber of Congress then they work on behalf of these groups:
Businesses
Rich
Evangelicals
MIC
Farmers
Now sometimes the order gets shuffled but these are people/groups they represent.
Not directly related - except also under the crypt keepers Wilbur Ross’s domain …
Editing to add another commentary per same event:
You are saying that John Abowd is lying about this. I know Abowd, and I’ve known a number of other Census statisticians.
I don’t believe Abowd would lie about this. If the decision was made, he would say so.
Now, it’s possible that the decision has been made and he hasn’t been informed of the decision, but I don’t believe that either. He is at a level and in a position in the Bureau where he would know the decision because he was part of making the decision. If the decision’s been made already, and Abowd finds out it was made, he’ll go straight back to upstate New York (Cornell), where he is a Professor of Economics and Statistics. He is on leave at the Census Bureau now.
The statement at ALEC was made by Kathleen Styles, who is the head of Stakeholder Relations for the 2020 Census. She would know what the stakeholders (in this case, GOP stakeholders) want, and would likely advocate for them with the Bureau. She would not be making the decisions, however. Styles is a career bureaucrat with Education and Census.
Abowd knows more about this than Styles. I don’t trust Styles to be honest with us, but I trust Abowd.
If the Democrats went he White House in 2020, they can stop this with an executive order, of the new Commerce secretary can mandate that the output files follow the 2010 format, plus whatever legal changes were mandated by Congress (none of this BS is in a law from Congress). That will, at least, throw everything into question and delay the outputs. and give enough time to force through the Census data the way they should have been, instead of the Republican version which is meant to cheat in elections. Going back to 2010 is the safest option legally, and the least troublesome since everyone felt with it before.
The workers in the Census Bureau are obviously not going along with the Republicans, and will fight very hard to make sure the Census is nonpartisan…we’ll see if they survive to the end of the administration, but I see them doing everything they can to protect the Census from politics, they really take that seriously.
And, another kudos to @tierney, the reporting on this at TPM is top notch, and really this should be front page news, it’s a huge deal for the future of the US.
I’ve seen this statement a couple of times in reporting on this issue. It would be really nice if articles could mention which states diverge from the “almost universal” practice
Whoops! Should have read the thread before posting my identical query
Considering that no one’s actually answered the question, repetition doesn’t hurt (though apparently it doesn’t help either).
the data will be subject to the Census Bureau’s privacy policies, including its new protocol to keep the personal data confidential, and would available for statistical purposes only
Remember the earlier article where it was explained that the anonymizing process applied by the Census Bureau is likely to make any citizenship data very hard to use for gerrymandering purposes. They basically inject noise into the data below the threshold of statistical significance.
My takeaway was that it might still be possible to rebalance power between states (and I’m sure every GOPer is over-the-moon at the prospect of weakening CA’s massive electoral advantage), but it was less clear that the data would be useful below that.
Not that this makes it okay or anything.
If Republicans pull this off, Democrats should take their rule to it’s natural conclusion - if the GOP excludes non-citizens when drawing up districts means they are also not counted when determining the number of representatives per state in the House too. And any federal aid issued in a per-capita basis would be also cut accordingly.
I’m pretty sure (but I can’t point at a link) that it has already been announced that the reapportionment would be done on a total resident population basis. If what Abowd said is true (and I believe it to be true, see above) CVAP can’t be used for reapportionment because it will not be in the December 2020 report that the Bureau transmits to Pelosi and McCarthy (not that Kevin McC will have the slightest idea what to do with it).
The reason the assholes GOPerverts want CVAP for redistricting is to assist in gerrymandering the states they control.
We need to push back against this LOUDLY. The NYT had an OpEd today pointing out the number of times Trump has backed down on an announced policy after it got significant negative feedback. And this is one idea of theirs that needs to be pushed back.
Even if we don’t succeed in changing Trump’s mind (this follows a decades-long GOP goal, after all), it should give the issue added visibility that could play into the 2020 election, and hopefully give us the power to fix it with a new chief executive in charge. Also, I hope, reducing the number of states the GOP controls.