What Are The Odds? Census Mistakes Overwhelmingly Benefit Democrats

A recent bombshell report reveals that U.S. census errors could provide significant and unfair advantages for Democrats in future elections, so naturally America’s corporate media have chosen to let those errors quietly slide.

Back in May, the U.S. Census Bureau released findings from its 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey (PES), a survey in which “the Census Bureau interviews a sampling of households across the country and then compares the results with actual responses from those households in the original 2020 Census records.” As noted by the Census Bureau, the results of the survey “cannot be used to change the final census count.”

While the agency found that the 2020 Census counts for 36 states and Washington D.C. were generally accurate, it also discovered that there were population undercounts in six states and overcounts in eight. When analyzing the states where significant counting errors were made, however, a startling pattern begins to emerge.

As detailed in the report, the six states that experienced population undercounts were Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. All but one (Illinois) of these states voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections and could be considered reliably Republican jurisdictions.

Conversely, a review of the eight states where overcounting occurred (Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Utah) finds that all but two (Ohio and Utah) voted for the Democrat nominee in the two previous presidential contests and could be considered electoral strongholds for the Democrat Party.

According to Hans von Spakovsky, the manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, such counting errors present numerous implications for the apportionment of congressional seats for the next decade.

“As a result of these errors, Florida did not receive two additional congressional seats, Texas lost out on an additional seat, Minnesota and Rhode Island each retained a congressional seat that should have been lost, and Colorado gained a new seat to which it had no right,” Spakovsky writes. “Florida, for example, was undercounted by 761,094 individuals while it only needed ‘around 171,500 more residents to gain an extra seat.’ Texas needed only ‘189,000 more residents to gain another congressional seat’ but was undercounted by 560,319 residents. Minnesota would have lost a congressional seat if the Census had counted 26 fewer residents; the PES says Minnesota was overcounted by 216,971 individuals.”

“Assuming the accuracy of the 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey and the errors it has revealed, certain states will be shorted in their congressional representation until after the 2030 Census, while other states will get more representation than they are entitled to,” he added.

In addition to congressional apportionment, the population miscalculations will also simultaneously affect the Electoral College map for the 2024 and 2028 presidential elections. Taking into account Spakovsky’s calculations, an increasingly conservative Florida, for instance, should potentially have 32 electoral votes for the next decade, while Democrat-leaning states such as Minnesota and Rhode Island should have only nine and three votes, respectively.

Despite the major impact the counting errors will have on Americans’ congressional representation and future elections, the U.S. Census Bureau says it cannot explain how such blunders occurred in the first place.

“While the 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey can estimate undercounts and overcounts in the census, PES data cannot answer why a particular state may have experienced one,” the agency said in its report.

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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