There is a Propublica Story Indicating that the Trump DOJ is demanding the Citizenship be put on the 2020 Census (it is on the ACS). This could have dire consequences for the 2020 Census
www.propublica.org/.../trump-justice-department-pushes-for-citizenship-question-on-census-alarming-experts
The Trump Justice Department is demanding that Citizenship be put on the 2020 Census. Below is a Propublica article, and a copy of the letter. This is a serious matter, and a group of voting rights experts are working on a response with Terri Ann Lowenthal and others (including Ken Prewitt) We might need AAPOR and others to weigh in.
This was tried by Senator Vitter and a Senator from Utah in 2010 and was eventually voted down by the Senate. There are all sorts of negative issues around this. It could cripple the Census, lead to the count not being accepted, lead to a reigniting of the Evenwel case that wanted to change the denominator for redistricting to Ctiizens of voting age, etc.
Trump Justice Department Pushes for Citizenship Question on Census, Alarming Experts
“This is a recipe for sabotaging the census,” said one. The administration’s stated reason for the controversial move: protecting civil rights.
by Justin Elliott Dec. 29, 7:36 p.m. EST The Justice Department is pushing for a question on citizenship to be added to the 2020 census, a move that observers say could depress participation by immigrants who fear that the government could use the information against them. That, in turn, could have potentially large ripple effects for everything the once-a-decade census determines — from how congressional seats are distributed around the country to where hundreds of billions of federal dollars are spent.
The DOJ made the request in a previously unreported letter, dated Dec. 12 and obtained by ProPublica, from DOJ official Arthur Gary to the top official at the Census Bureau, which is part of the Commerce Department. The letter argues that the DOJ needs better citizenship data to better enforce the Voting Rights Act “and its important protections against racial discrimination in voting.”
A Census Bureau spokesperson confirmed the agency received the letter and said the “request will go through the well-established process that any potential question would go through.” The DOJ declined to comment and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Observers said they feared adding a citizenship question would not only lower response rates, but also make the census more expensive and throw a wrench into the system with just two years to go before the 2020 count. Questions are usually carefully field-tested, a process that can take years.
“This is a recipe for sabotaging the census,” said Arturo Vargas, a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Census and the executive director of NALEO Educational Fund, a Latino advocacy group. “When you start adding last-minute questions that are not tested — how will the public understand the question? How much will it suppress response rates?”
The 2010 census included a handful of questions covering age, sex, race, Hispanic origin, household relationship and owner/renter status — but not citizenship.
“People are not going to come out to be counted because they’re going to be fearful the information would be used for negative purposes,” said Steve Jost, a former top bureau official during the 2010 census. “This line about enforcing voting rights is a new and scary twist.” He noted that since the first census in 1790, the goal has been to count everyone in the country, not just citizens.
There have been rumblings since the beginning of the year that the Trump administration wanted to add a citizenship question to the census. Adding to the concerns about the 2020 count, Politico reported last month that the administration may appoint to a top job at the bureau a Republican redistricting expert who wrote a book called “Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America.” The Census Bureau’s population count determines how the 435 U.S. House seats are distributed.
The law governing the census gives the commerce secretary, currently Wilbur Ross, the power to decide on questions. They must be submitted to Congress for review two years before the census, in this case by April 2018. A census spokesperson said the agency will also release the questions publicly at that time.
A recent Census Bureau presentation shows that the political climate is already having an effect on responsiveness to the bureau’s American Community Survey, which asks a more extensive list of questions, including on citizenship status, to about one in 38 households in the country per year. In one case, census interviewers reported, a respondent “walked out and left interviewer alone in home during citizenship questions.”
“Three years ago, [it] was so much easier to get respondents compared to now because of the government changes … and trust factors. … Three years ago I didn’t have problems with the immigration questions,” said another census interviewer.
The Justice Department letter argues that including a citizenship question on the once-a-decade census would allow the agency to better enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars the dilution of voting power of a minority group through redistricting.
“To fully enforce those requirements, the Department needs a reliable calculation of the citizen voting-age population in localities where voting rights violations are alleged or suspected,” the letter states. The letter asks that the Census Bureau “reinstate” the question.
The census, however, hasn’t included questions about citizenship since the early 19th century. The Census Bureau has gathered such data in other surveys. The bureau switched the method of those surveys after the 2000 census. Today, it conducts the American Community Survey every year, which includes questions about citizenship, along with many other questions. The survey covers a sample of residents of the United States.
Experts said the Justice Department’s letter was misleading. And they questioned the Justice Department’s explanation in the letter, noting that the American Community Survey produces data on citizenship that has been used in Section 2 cases.
“You could always have better data but it seems like a strange concern because no one in the communities who are most affected have been raising this concern,” said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program.
Do you have information about the Trump administration and the census? Contact Justin at justin@propublica.org or via Signal at 774-826-6240.
Dec. 12 2017 Dr. Ron JarminPerforming the Non-Exclusive Functions and Duties of the DirectorU.S. Census BureauUnited States Department of CommerceWashington, D.C. 20233-0001 Re: Request To Reinstate Citizenship Question On 2020 Census Questionnaire Dear Dr. Jarmin: The Department of Justice is committed to robust and evenhanded enforcement of the Nation's civil rights laws and to free and fair elections for all Americans. In furtherance of that commitment. I write on behalf of the Department to formally request that the Census Bureau reinstate on the 2020 Census questionnaire a question regarding citizenship, formerly included in the so-called “long form" census. This data is critical to the Department’s enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and its important protections against racial discrimination in voting. To fully enforce those requirements, the Department needs a reliable calculation of the citizen voting-age population in localities where voting rights violations are alleged or suspected. As demonstrated below, the decennial census questionnaire is the most appropriate vehicle for collecting that data, and reinstating a question on citizenship will best enable the Department to protect all American citizens' voting rights under Section 2. The Supreme Court has held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits “vote dilution” by state and local jurisdictions engaged in redistricting, which can occur when a racial group is improperly deprived of a single-member district in which it could form a majority. See Thornburg v. Gingles,478 U.S. 30, 50 (1986). Multiple federal courts of appeals have held that, where citizenship rates are at issue in a vote-dilution case, citizen voting-age population is the proper metric for determining whether a racial group could constitute a majority in a single-member district See, e.g., Reyes v. City of Farmers Branch, 586 F.3d 1019, 1023–24 (5th Cir. 2009); Barnett v. City of Chicago, 141 F.3d 699, 704 (7th Cir. 1998); Negrn v. City of Miami Beach, 113 F.3d 1563,1567-69 (11th Cir. 1997); Romero v. City of Pomona, 883 F.2d 1418, 1426 (9th Cir. 1989), overruled in part on other grounds by Townsend v. Holman Consulting Corp., 914 F.2d 1136, 1141 (9th Cir. 1990); see also LULAC v. Perry, 548 U.S. 399, 423–442 (2006) (analyzing vote-dilution claim by reference to citizen voting-age population). The purpose of Section 2’s vote-dilution prohibition “is to facilitate participation ... in our political process” by preventing unlawful dilution of the vote on the basis of race. Campos v. City of Houston, 113 F.3d 544, 548 (5th Cir. 1997). Importantly, “[t]he plain language of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act makes clear that its protections apply to United States citizens.” Id. Indeed, courts have reasoned that “[t]he right to vote is one of the badges of citizenship” and that “[t]he dignity and very concept of citizenship are diluted if noncitizens are allowed to vote.” Barnett, 141 F.3d at 704. Thus, it would be the wrong result for a legislature or a court to draw a single-member district in which a numerical racial minority group in a jurisdiction was a majo rity of the total voting-age population in that district but “continued to be defeated at the polls” because it was not a majority of the citizen voting-age population. Campos, 113 F.3d at 548. These cases make clear that, in order to assess and enforce compliance with Section 2’s protection against discrimination in voting, the Department needs to be able to obtain citizen voting-age population data for census blocks, block groups, counties, towns, and other locations where potential Section 2 violations are alleged or suspected. From 1970 to 2000, the Census Bureau included a citizenship question on the so-called “long form” questionnaire that it sent to approximately one in every six households during each decennial census. See, e.g., U.S. Census Bureau, Summary File 3: 2000 Census of Population & Housing—Appendix B at B-7 (July 2007), available at www.census.gov/.../sf3.pdf (last visited Nov. 22, 2017); U.S. Census Bureau, Index of Questions, available atwww.census.gov/.../ (last visited Nov. 22, 2017). For years, the Department used the data collected in response to that question in assessing compliance with Section 2 and in litigation to enforce Section 2’s protections against racial discrimination in voting.
In the 2010 Census, however, no census questionnaire included a question regarding citizenship. Rather, following the 2000 Census, the Census Bureau discontinued the “long form” questionnaire and replaced it with the American Community Survey (ACS). The ACS is a sampling survey that is sent to only around one in every thirty-eight households each year and asks a variety of questions regarding demographic information, including citizenship. See U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey Information Guide at 6, available at www.census.gov/.../ACS Information Guide.pdf (last visited Nov. 22,2017). The ACS is currently the Census Bureau’s only survey that collects information regarding citizenship and estimates citizen voting-age population. The 2010 redistricting cycle was the first cycle in which the ACS estimates provided the Census Bureau’s only citizen voting-age population data. The Department and state and local jurisdictions therefore have used those ACS estimates for this redistricting cycle. The ACS, however, does not yield the ideal data for such purposes for several reasons: Jurisdictions conducting redistricting, and the Department in enforcing Section 2, already use the total population data from the census to determine compliance with the Constitution’s one-person, one-vote requirement, see Evenwel v. Abbott, 136 S. Ct. 1120 (Apr. 4, 2016). As a result, using the ACS citizenship estimates means relying on two different data sets, the scope and level of detail of which vary quite significantly. Because the ACS estimates are rolling and aggregated into one-year, three-year, and five- year estimates, they do not align in time with the decennial census data. Citizenship data from the decennial census, by contrast, would align in time with the total and voting-age population data from the census that jurisdictions already use in redistricting. The ACS estimates are reported at a ninety percent confidence level, and the margin of error increases as the sample size—and, thus, the geographic area—decreases. See U.S. Census Bureau, Glossary: Confidence interval (American Community Survey), available at www.census.gOv/.../ (last visited November 22, 2017). By contrast, decennial census data is a full count of the population. Census data is reported to the census block level, while the smallest unit reported in the ACS estimates is the census block group. SeeAmerican Community Survey Data 3, 5, 10. Accordingly, redistricting jurisdictions and the Department are required to perform further estimates and to interject further uncertainty in order to approximate citizen voting-age population at the level of a census block, which is the fundamental building block of a redistricting plan. Having all of the relevant population and citizenship data available in one data set at the census block level would greatly assist the redistricting process. For all of these reasons, the Department believes that decennial census questionnaire data regarding citizenship, if available, would be more appropriate for use in redistricting and in Section 2 litigation than the ACS citizenship estimates. Accordingly, the Department formally requests that the Census Bureau reinstate into the 2020 Census a question regarding citizenship. We also request that the Census Bureau release this new data regarding citizenship at the same time as it releases the other redistricting data, by April 1 following the 2020 Census. At the same time, the Department requests that the Bureau also maintain the citizenship question on the ACS, since such question is necessary, inter alia, to yield information for the periodic determinations made by the Bureau under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act, 52 U.S.C. § 10503. Please let me know if you have any questions about this letter or wish to discuss this request I can be reached at (202) 514-3452, or atArthur.Gary@usdoj.gov. Sincerely yours, Arthur E. GaryGeneral CounselJustice Management Division