New Delays In Final Stage Of Census Could Foil Trump's Plan To Rig It
Source: Talking Points Memo
The Census Bureau has identified issues in the data from the 2020 decennial census that will take an additional 20 days or so for it to fix, and thus delay the release of survey’s apportionment data until after President Trump leaves office, TPM has learned.
According to a person inside the Census Bureau, the additional time it will take to reprocess the data in question has pushed back the target date for release of the state population counts until Jan. 26 – Feb. 6.
That would mean President-elect Joe Biden will be in the White House when the Census Bureau delivers to him the numbers for him to transmit to Congress for the purposes of determining how many House seats each state will get for the next decade.
President Trump had been seeking to exclude undocumented immigrants from that count, with a policy that several lower courts have deemed illegal in rulings Trump is hoping the Supreme Court will overturn. Excluding undocumented immigrants from that count would decrease the House seats given to immigrant-rich states like California, and increase the representation for whiter, more Republican parts of the country.
Read more: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-delay-census-apportionment
New York Times:
Officials have concluded the Census Bureau won’t have data on time to carry out the administration’s goal of stripping unauthorized immigrants from population totals for apportionment.
In a blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to strip unauthorized immigrants from census totals used for reapportionment, Census Bureau officials have concluded that they cannot produce the state population totals required to reallocate seats in the House of Representatives until after President Trump leaves office in January.
The president said in July that he planned to remove unauthorized immigrants from the count for the first time in history, leaving an older and whiter population as the basis for divvying up House seats, a shift that would be likely to increase the number of House seats held by Republicans over the next decade.
But on Wednesday, according to three bureau officials, the Census Bureau told the Commerce Department that a growing number of snags in the massive data-processing operation that generates population totals had delayed the completion of population calculations at least until Jan. 26, and perhaps to mid-February. Those officials spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the Trump administration.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose department oversees the bureau, was informed of the holdup on Wednesday evening, those people and others said. The Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The director of the Census Bureau, Steven Dillingham, acknowledged a delay in a statement issued on Thursday, but did not explicitly rule out delivering reapportionment totals before Mr. Trump’s term ends.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/us/2020-census-data.html
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Now it's biting them in the ass!
