Former census chief: Skewed 2020 census counts meant six states wrongly lost a House seat, six states gained one - Entrepreneur Generations

The 2020 census was underfunded, understaffed, and cut short. Though this apparently affected some rural areas, widespread undercounting of Blacks and Hispanics and overcounting of whites and Asians resulted in a malapportionment of U.S. House seats that tended to benefit more rural states, Robert Shapiro writes for Washington Monthly. Shapiro oversaw the 2000 census as President Clinton's undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs, and chairs economic policy think tank Sonecon.

"The large-scale errors in the census cost New York, Texas, Florida, Arizona, California, and New Jersey one seat each, and resulted in an extra representative for Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Montana, Wisconsin, and Indiana," Shapiro writes. "Those wide-ranging errors are matters of public record, because the professionals at the Census Bureau obligingly report the decennial census undercount and overcount rates by race and ethnicity. Compared to 2010, undercounts in 2020 jumped from 2.06 to 3.3 percent for Blacks, from 1.54 to 4.99 percent for Hispanics, and from 0.15 to 0.91 percent for Native Americans on reservations and Alaskan Natives. Overcounts also shot up, increasing from 0.83 to 1.64 percent for whites and from virtually zero to 2.62 percent for Asians." Shapiro and his researchers applied the error rates to each state's racial and ethnic makeup to see how much the miscounts skewed congressional apportionment.

"The debasement of the 2020 census did not have clear partisan effects. The more diverse states that lost out—states in which Black and Hispanic people account for between 33 percent and 52 percent of the population—include not only blue New York, California, and New Jersey but also red Texas and Florida and purple Arizona," Shapiro writes. "Similarly, the unwitting winners include not only red Montana and Indiana but also blue Minnesota and Oregon and purple Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—all states with populations that are 80 to 87 percent white and Asian."

Shapiro notes that the Trump administration didn't skew the census by overtly manipulating the results but by simply making it easier for serious errors to occur.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/UE0FrDY Former census chief: Skewed 2020 census counts meant six states wrongly lost a House seat, six states gained one - Entrepreneur Generations

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