How The Citizenship Question Could Break The Census

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Every 10 years, the Constitution requires the government to count all the millions of people living in the United States. The decennial census is a massive, painstaking undertaking that results in a national portrait in numbers. It tells us how many people live here, where people have moved and how our country’s racial and ethnic makeup has changed. And today the Supreme Court will weigh whether asking respondents whether they are U.S. citizens would undermine the census’s mandate to count every person.

A lot is determined by the data from each census, which is why adding or subtracting survey questions can be contentious. In addition to determining how many seats in the U.S. House each state has, census data touches almost every corner of American life, including business, education and polling, to name a few. “These numbers are the gold standard body of statistics that make the country run,” said Thomas Wolf, counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Critics of the proposal to add a citizenship question to the census are concerned that if a large number of immigrants don’t respond or respond incorrectly, the results will be inaccurate, and as a result, certain areas of the country will lose funding or political representation. Both parties could be affected, since an undercount of immigrants would likely hurt red states like Texas and blue states like California.

Questions related to a person’s citizenship did once appear on the census, but historians say the phrasing and intent of those earlier questions were different — and, in any case, they were removed from the main head count after 1950 in a bid to improve the census’s accuracy. Meanwhile, social science methods have evolved to the point that high-quality citizenship data can be — and already is — collected via other Census Bureau surveys and administrative records. So the Trump administration is facing an important question: Why add a question to the census that could harm the quality and credibility of the data — and also may not be necessary?

The case before the Supreme Court is about the legality of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census; it has been challenged by an array of states and civil rights organizations. Ross says the question was added in response to a request from the Justice Department for more detailed citizenship data to help enforce the Voting Rights Act, but three lower court judges have all concluded that the evidence shows he had already decided to add the question and used the Justice Department as a pretext. The judges concluded, too, that the administration violated standards of transparency and accountability required of executive agencies by failing to test the question and ignoring expert advice against adding it. Two also ruled that the question would violate the Constitution because it seems likely to result in an undercount.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-citizenship-question-could-break-the-census/