OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
A supposed error in the count of the most recent Census has given Democrats a major advantage in the next presidential election and right now in Congress.
For some reason, and no one has explained why, every state that was undercounted has been reliably Republican in elections, and every state that was overcounted, other than Ohio and Utah, has been reliably Democrat, Breitbart News reported.
With the 2022 elections roughly 50 days away and the Supreme Court about to take up major election cases, conservatives are crying foul and demanding answers.
The Census Clause of the Constitution requires a census to count the United States population every 10 years. Those totals determine how many seats in Congress each state has, what the lines of every federal and state legislative district is in each of those states, and how many votes each state has in the Electoral College to elect the president every four years.
An official survey shows that census workers undercounted people in Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. The same survey shows workers overcounted people in Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Utah.
This robs Texas of two House seats and Florida of one, while giving Rhode Island a seat it does not deserve. The effects are also going to be felt in the Electoral college as the number of Electoral votes a state has is equivalent to the number of House seats it has.
“If a politician from Florida decides to run for president in 2024, his (or her) home state will be short two votes in the Electoral College,” Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation and the American Constitutional Rights Union said, “and when the new session of the U.S. House of Representatives convenes in January 2023, Florida will be missing two congressional seats to which it is entitled.”
Kristin Tate penned an op ed for The Hill in June examining the disparities.
“The Census Bureau acknowledged that 14 states had significant miscounts in the 2020 census. See if you notice a pattern here: Among the overcounted states are Hawaii, Delaware, Rhode Island, Minnesota, New York and Massachusetts. Five of these six voted for Joe Biden in that year’s presidential election. The undercounted states were Texas, Illinois, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas. Five of these six voted for Donald Trump,” she said.
“The changes will impact national politics in a dramatic fashion. The 2020 census led to significant changes to congressional seats apportioned to states. Texas gained two congressional seats, while North Carolina, Florida, Montana, Colorado and Oregon each gained one. New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and California each lost one seat in Congress. There was significant surprise that population growth winners such as Texas and Florida didn’t gain more seats. With the possible exception of Illinois not losing a seat, the likely effects of an accurate count would have overwhelmingly aided red states. Simply put, the revised figures show that (mostly) red states had even quicker relative population growth compared to the rest of the country — and especially compared to (mostly) blue states. It is entirely possible that undercounted states could have gained at least one seat in Congress, while overcounted states may have lost at least one each,” the political commentator said.
“The error resulted in over 600,000 overcounted residents in New York and a similar amount undercounted in Texas. Last year, media coverage lamented that New York lost a member of Congress by being 89 residents short. With the revised, accurate numbers, New York may have lost a second seat — had the corrected numbers been available earlier. Considering that Republicans need to flip just five seats to retake Congress, each misplaced seat is crucial,” she said.
And, she said, there is no way to fix it.
“ The Supreme Court considered whether revised, more accurate numbers could be used for reapportionment in 1999 and determined that such differences could not be considered in congressional seat counts. The inaccurate 2020 figures will stand,” she said.
