Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) on Monday urged Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to investigate and correct errors from the 2020 Census that may have improperly benefited Democrats and illegal aliens.
The Hoosier conservative wrote to Lutnick:
I urge you to investigate and correct errors from the 2020 Census that handed disproportionate political power to Democrats and illegal aliens. The Census Bureau adopted a new and opaque methodology called differential privacy that, by design, scrambles the populations of states and voting districts. As prepared by the Biden administration, the 2020 Census reports miscounted the population of fourteen states, wrongly allocating six congressional seats and Electoral College votes to the Democrat party. The reports may have also miscounted the population in a number of voting districts. And the reports definitively included illegal aliens without tracking those aliens’ citizenship status. If left uncorrected, these errors will continue diluting the political power of American citizens.
As Ken Klukowski, a former Breitbart News senior legal contributor, wrote, data revealed that the “Census Bureau in 2020 overcounted the population in Democrat states and undercounted in Republican states, resulting in wins for the Democrat party in congressional reapportionment.”
This gave Democrats an “unmerited boost in the Electoral College for the 2024 presidential election.”
The United States Census Bureau has reportedly used variations of differential privacy to install confidentiality protections, or what they call “disclosure avoidance.” For the 2020 Census data, the Bureau used a newer protection framework based on “differential privacy.”
Banks explained why he has issues with differential privacy, writing:
As problematic as the 2020 Census was for apportionment, it may have been disastrous for redistricting. Differential privacy alters the total population of individual voting districts, meaning that any voting district drawn since the 2020 census may in fact have been based on false data and may even be unlawful. The worst part is that we don’t know how many voting districts are problematic. A file containing the original, unaltered census data exists, but only a few bureaucrats have access to it.
“It is crucial that the Census Bureau republishes the 2020 Census using the raw data so that states have a clear picture of their voting districts,” Banks added. “The Census Bureau must also use a methodology for the 2030 census that accurately counts state and voting district populations and that does not disproportionately benefit one political party.”
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