The screw-ups in the 2020 Census and the errors it created cannot be corrected.
At least not without going to the Supreme Court.
Republican-leaning states have been shortchanged at least three congressional seats and electoral college votes because their population was undercounted in the 2020 census. Democrat-leaning states received at least one extra seat and vote due to census overcounts and kept at least two they should have lost, according to an analysis of Census Bureau ’s post-census survey.
The U.S. Census logo appears on census materials received in the mail with an invitation to fill out census information online in San Anselmo, California, on March 19, 2020. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The bureau acknowledged the errors but said there’s no way to correct them until the next census in 2030.
Several experts and at least one lawmaker have expressed concern over the errors.
“It’s consistently undercounting red states and consistently overcounting blue states,” commented Hans von Spakovsky, head of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
He called it “a very odd coincidence,” noting that “so far, the Census Bureau hasn’t really explained how and why they made these mistakes.”
It appears the first to sound the alarm over the issue back in June was Fair Lines America (FLA), a conservative-leaning nonprofit focused on redistricting issues.
“It’s obviously concerning that there’s a pattern in the error of the census,” said Adam Kincaid, executive director of FLA and the National Republican Redistricting Trust.
The Census Bureau identified 14 states with statistically significant errors in the census count. Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas—all GOP-dominated, save for Illinois—were undercounted. Meanwhile, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Utah—all Democrat-dominated save for Ohio and Utah—were overcounted.
For comparison, no state saw a significant error in the 2000 and 2010 censuses.
The 2020 error pattern still holds when including states where the miscount didn’t reach statistical significance. Among all the 50 states and the District of Columbia, only two Democrat-leaning states registered an undercount: Illinois and Maryland. On the other hand, 12 Democrat-leaning states saw overcounts of at least 1 percent, compared to five Republican-leaning states: Alaska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia. States with no clear-cut leaning, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, tended to have relatively accurate counts.