census

wilbur ross subpoena to testify to house on census voter suppression 3/19

SEE LUTNICK DOGEBAGS AFPI CLAREMONTERS

SEE NO RECORDS STATS

see voter suppr 3

-=-=

QUESTIONS CHANGED TO GET RID OF STATS

RWW

9 26

Vittoria Elliott and David Gilbert @ Wired: A US Census Report on Noncitizen Voting Used Bad Data to Reach Faulty Conclusions

Trump has touted a recent Census report. WIRED found grave flaws in its analysis and the process behind it, and confirmed the identity of several of its authors—among them a one-time DOGE affiliate.

9 26

RWW -->

A reportpublished by the US Census Bureau last month purported to uncover evidence backing up President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that noncitizens voting cost him the 2020 election. It was the latest salvo in Trump’s broader assault on the safety of US elections. “I WON THE ELECTION,” Trump quickly declared on Truth Social after the publication of the report.

However, though Trump and other government officials quickly shared and praised the report, a WIRED investigation has uncovered significant flaws in the data used to compile the report, as well as in the approval process used prior to publication. WIRED has also learned that a number of the report’s authors have links to the Trump administration and the Republican party. They include one former affiliate of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and two researchers from the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a highly influential think tank founded by veterans of Trump’s first administration.

The report, titled “Noncitizen Voting in the 2020 Election: A Beginning Analysis,” claims that an analysis of over 128 million voter records from the 2020 election identified 24,000 people tied to administrative records indicating noncitizen status. The numbers range from 4,300 in California to fewer than 15 in Wyoming—not nearly enough to have affected the outcome of the presidential race. But even these figures seem extremely questionable, and experts and Census Bureau employees who spoke to WIRED allege it is much likelier that they represent basic analytical errors than actual instances of noncitizen voting.

The Census Bureau did not respond to a request for comment. The White House directed WIRED to President Donald Trump’s post on Truth Social and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s post on X, where both officials praised the report.

The number of noncitizens voting in US elections has been repeatedly shown to be vanishingly small. In Utah, for example, the state’s top election official, Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, reviewed the state’s approximately 2.1 million registered voters. The result was the discovery of 27 “confirmed noncitizens,” none of whom was ever confirmed to have voted. Studies in Pennsylvania and Idaho have returned similar outcomes. Still, the idea that a flood of noncitizens have been voting in US elections for over a decade, skewing the outcomes, has remained one of the central conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and his allies.

John Abowd, former associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist at the Census Bureau, called the Census report “statistical nonsense” and wrote on LinkedIn that “it is extremely uncommon for the US Census Bureau to publish a research report, even one of blog length, without the authors explicitly listed.”

Census Bureau sources who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity could not say what prompted the report. Records reviewed by WIRED, though, show it originated at the Center for Economic Studies, a division within the Census Bureau that uses confidential data to conduct research.

According to those records, one of the authors was Dan Sweeney, currently a deputy general counsel at the Department of Commerce overseeing the Census Bureau. He previously worked as the “DOGE legal liaison and deregulatory attorney” at the Environmental Protection Agency, according to his LinkedIn profile. Michael Lachanski was also an author, according to two sources with knowledge of the report’s origins, and he was appointed to his current role as the deputy director for data, policy, and science at the Census Bureau just two months ago. Previously, he was a fellow at the Trump-aligned Claremont Institute.

The two America First staffers involved in authoring the report, according to records reviewed by WIRED, were Matthew Jensen and Jeff McCrea. McCrea previously served as campaign manager for former congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, who has expressed a belief in creationism and signed an amicus brief contesting the 2020 election results. Jensen previously worked for the American Enterprise Institute, where, according to his bio on the America First Policy Institute website, “contributed to the design of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” the tax law passed during the first Trump administration.

Sweeney, Lachanski, Jensen, and McCrea did not respond to requests for comment.

Sources who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity confirmed that Jensen and McCrea are working in government on loan from America First through what is known as the Intergovernment Personnel Act. The IPA is meant to allow people with specialized skill sets from certain institutions, like nonprofits and universities, to work for the government for up to two years on a temporary appointment.

Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, says that the Bureau has long used IPAs for scientific work. “But they do what the civil servants require them to do, not what the political [appointees] require them to do.”

Boyd says that the group of people who records indicate authored the noncitizen voting report appear to be of a different stripe. “These ultimately appear to be people coming from a Republican operation that’s pretending to be a 501c3,” she says. “Rather than doing the work for the agency, it appears they’re doing work in political interest.” The AFPI did not respond to a request for comment.

The report was approved by the Census Bureau’s disclosure review board on August 7 through an email vote, which is typically used for publications with tight deadlines or in response to demands from Congress or the White House. The members of the review board who approved the report were shown the three tables contained in the final publication, but not the analysis that accompanied them, according to one source within the bureau who had access to the materials submitted to the review board.

The report concludes that the author’s analysis “readily determined with high confidence that over 128 million of these voter records represented citizens, and that over 24,000 of these voter records represented noncitizens at the time of the election. Over 32 million voter records remain to be analyzed.”

According to documents viewed by WIRED, the authors used data from the DataClear 2020 voting file—a commercial dataset—as well as USCIS immigration records (both the 2025 extract and the February 2026 A-number and case files); USCIS DACA approvals from 2025; State Department immigrant and nonimmigrant visas for 2017 through 2023; ICE student, removal, and national-docket records; IRS form 1040 for 2020; Social Security Numident (2019 and 2020); and State Department passport issuances across 50 vintages from 1978 through 2025.

Former Census officials say the breadth of data used, as well as the lack of clear explanation of the methodology employed to analyze it, raises significant red flags.

“We don't know whether or how the sources are updating their citizenship info,” Amy O’Hara, a former official who used to run the administrative data linkage unit at Census, tells WIRED. “It is really hard to join and deduplicate these files, especially across a range of years.”

In order to match people between surveys and records without revealing their identities, the Census Bureau uses what are known as Protected Identification Keys (PIKs), which replace identifying information with a unique code. Sources who spoke to WIRED say that they are unsure which data points were used to match PIK data across the many datasets, though something like an address could be used for cross-referencing.

Though PIKs have been used for years to allow academics and government employees to conduct studies without compromising the privacy of the people whose data it is, they are not foolproof. A January 2026 study published by the Census earlier this year found that “while PIK assignment is generally accurate, some person records are not successfully assigned a PIK, which can lead to sample selection bias in analyses of linked data.”

“The brief says ‘high confidence,’ which indicates some probability,” one bureau source who spoke on the condition of anonymity over fears of retribution by the administration, tells WIRED. “However, no confidence intervals in the tables of the brief are shown. The supposed count of non-voters is small relative to the total state population.” The source alleges that there are probably PIK errors and not actual noncitizens who voted.

Abowd says that false match rates—in this case, when a voting record is assigned the wrong PIK, and then when it is “matched” with citizenship data–are likely to be higher when using commercial data like those used in the report. This means that the analysis is more likely to return a “false positive” showing that a noncitizen had voted. “You can’t estimate the false positive rate without more technical details” that were not included in the report, Abowd tells WIRED. “Because the false match rate is much greater than the estimated noncitizen voting rate, the alleged noncitizen voters are more likely to be data errors.”

All of this, Boyd worries, could undermine more than just trust in voting and elections—it could make academics and researchers doubt the quality and reliability of the products and data that the Census Bureau produces. “They're putting it out with the imprimatur of the Census Bureau so it looks legitimate,” she says. “But there’s no authors, no methods, no discussions of the limitations of the data, or the Bureau's approach.”

Republicans have already attacked the accuracy of the 2020 census, alleging that an algorithmic process used by the Bureau to protect data privacy had disproportionately favored Democrats in terms of the drawing of congressional districts. In August, WIRED reported that an internal memo circulated by the Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, proposed excluding immigrants from the count, a move that could radically reshape how congressional districts are apportioned.

The report is also just one part of a broad attack on the integrity of American elections by the Trump administration, which includes weaponizing the Department of Justice, dismantling voter protections, attempting to wrest control of election administration from states, and pushing an endless barrage of baseless conspiracy theories about voting in America.

-=-=

Layla A. Jones @ Talking Points Memo: How a Baseless, Right-Wing Social Media Panic Led to Dramatic Changes at the Census Bureau

When longtime Indiana politician Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) lobbed a powerful allegation against the Census Bureau last October, what had been a low-profile, fringe GOP conspiracy theory burst to the fore. Banks said he believed the Census Bureau had injected errors in the decennial population count and survey which were so severe, they netted Democrats more representation in Congress at the expense of Republican seats.

-=-=

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/charge-and-arrest-wilbur-ross/

census

reboot of fail 1st term

NOTE PROJECTION RUBBER REVERSE 2x

an 8 25

Trump is reviving his years-old plan to exclude undocumented immigrants from the U.S. census, which legal scholars say is in direct conflict with the Constitution’s requirement to count all persons.

“I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024,” Trump wrote Thursday morning. “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

The President’s remarks appear to align with his plan to redistrict red states to deliver more GOP-controlled seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, where Republicans currently hold a razor-thin majority.

Absent court orders, it is extremely rare for a state, outside of the census window, to redistrict with the direct goal of providing more seats to a particular party, and the United States has never conducted a decennial census officially excluding undocumented immigrants.

IFrame Content

The Fourteenth Amendment states that “the whole number of persons in each State” is to be counted.

On Wednesday night, Trump White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller claimed that during the first Trump presidency, Democrats “rigged” the 2020 census by including undocumented immigrants, causing them to gain an extra 20 to 30 seats in the House.

“At every level this country—Illinois, Chicago, New York, Massachusetts—Democrats have gerrymandered the vote beyond recognition to try to maintain their advantage in the House elections,” Miller alleged.

“Democrats rigged the 2020 census by including illegal aliens,” he charged, despite every census in U.S. history, per the U.S. Constitution, having done so.

Independent analysis contradicts Miller’s claim.

“A Pew Research Center analysis found that if unauthorized immigrants were excluded from the 2020 apportionment count, three states could have each lost a congressional seat,” Axios reported.

Watch the video below or at this link.

---

ca lost seat 1st 1x? NY by 89 ppl

evidence of Trump's final act of 'sabotage'

Igor Derysh Salon

April 28, 2021

Democratic lawmakers and election experts expressed concerns that Monday's release of the Census Bureau's congressional apportionment data reflected a systematic undercount of Latino residents that may be linked to former President Donald Trump's efforts to change census rules.

The Census Bureau that Texas would gain two House seats after the latest population count, while Florida, Colorado, North Carolina, Oregon and Montana would each gain one. California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia will each lose a seat. But those numbers were well short of the projected changes, particularly in states with fast-growing Latino populations like Texas, Florida and Arizona. All three of those states were projected to gain one additional seat apiece, sparking concerns that Latino residents were undercounted, which could have important effects on political power and the distribution of federal funds.

"There is a serious issue with undercounting of Hispanics in this Census," warned Sam Wang, a professor who runs the Princeton Election Consortium and Princeton Gerrymandering Project. "The states that underperformed relative to July 2020 population estimates included Texas, Florida, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada — all Hispanic-rich states. A real risk of poor representation."

Dave Wasserman, an election data expert at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, agreed that lower-than-expected counts in Arizona, Florida, Texas and California may suggest a "larger-than-expected, systemic undercount in heavily Hispanic areas."

It will be months before the Census Bureau releases more detailed data in August, and only after that can the congressional redistricting process begin.

"The initial results are surprising enough that once more details are released, we will be able to better determine to what extent the Latino population was fairly and accurately counted," Arturo Vargas, president of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, told The Los Angeles Times.

Myriad factors undoubtedly affected the census count, not all of which are political. "The census numbers as a whole have been shaped by a lot of negative and positive forces," Thomas Wolf, senior counsel at Brennan Center for Justice, told Mother Jones. "We had wildfires, COVID, displacement, hurricanes."

But many were quick to blame Trump's failed attempt to add a citizenship question to the census for a potential undercount of Latino voters after accusing the administration of trying to "sabotage" an accurate count. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected the attempt and advocacy groups spent months on outreach to traditionally undercounted communities, but some fear damage may already have been done.

"It caused people to not respond to the census," Kimball Brace, president of the redistricting consulting firm Election Data Services, told the Arizona Daily Star. "And, as a result, they were all lower than what they were anticipating. … If you got all of those press reports and commentary and everything else talking about how much Trump doesn't want people to respond if they're Hispanic, you don't necessarily have to have a question on the survey."

The reapportionment data stunned political observers in Arizona, which saw its population grow by 11% over the last decade but failed to gain a House seat. Some lawmakers faulted Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who invested nearly $2 million to boost response rates, for not doing enough to counter Trump's impact on the count.

Arizona state Sen. Martín Quezada, a Democrat from Phoenix, faulted Trump's census efforts for costing the state an additional seat but said Ducey deserves blame too after Quezada's bill to fund census efforts in areas heavily impacted by COVID-19 was rejected by the Republican-led legislature.

Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., said in a statement that "Ducey refused to stand up for Arizona and instead followed former President Trump's strategy to intimidate Latinos and discourage their participation."

Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., said on Twitter that he had helped lead the effort to extend the census deadline "because we *knew* Latinos, Native Americans, and Arizonans in rural & hard-to-reach areas weren't being counted. This undercount is an intentional part of Trump's legacy."

A spokesperson for Ducey pushed back on the claims, telling KPNX-TV that the state's rates were similar to other states and that response rate from tribal communities was high.

Census Bureau officials also told NPR they are confident in the accuracy of the population number.

But the missed projections were evident in other states with large and growing Latino populations, including California, which lost a House seat for the first time in history. Democrats widely blamed Trump.

"The Trump administration did everything it could to prevent an accurate count in the #2020Census, and now Californians are paying the price," tweeted Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif. "The culture of fear he instilled within our communities jeopardizes billions in funding that our state deserves."

Though Texas emerged as the big winner with two additional seats, state Democrats slammed Republican officials for failing to counter Trump's efforts to "manipulate" the census.

"Knowing we were at risk of a considerable undercount, Gov. Greg Abbott and our Republican leaders did nothing," Rep. Chris Turner, chairman of the state House Democratic Caucus, said in a statement. "Last session, House and Senate Democrats filed bills and attempted to amend the budget to ensure Texas invested in counting every resident. All these efforts were blocked by the Republican majority," he added.

Monday's release was largely touted as a win for Republicans, with states carried by Trump seeing a net gain of three seats while states won by President Biden lost three. While red states will see a slight boost in their Electoral College power, it's not entirely clear how the data will affect redistricting.

"Reapportionment itself means little compared to the redistricting fights to come. The bigger shift in House seats are likely to come from how districts are drawn, not how many districts each state gets," Wasserman, of the Cook Political Report, told Axios. "On balance, I think this reapportionment offers a small boost for Republicans, but the bigger boost is likely to come from how Republicans draw these seats in Florida, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia."

California is expected to lose a Democratic seat while West Virginia will lose a Republican seat, presumably canceling each other out. Illinois and Ohio already have heavily partisan maps so Illinois' Democratic majority and Ohio's Republican majority are each expected to lose a seat, also canceling each other out, according to Wang, the Princeton University professor. Pennsylvania is expected to lose a Democratic seat, but since Democrats control the map-drawing process in New York, they are likely to cancel that out by eliminating a seat that favors Republicans, Wang predicted. New "fair map" laws and independent redistricting commissions in Ohio and Pennsylvania may lessen the partisan impact.

Michigan's new independent redistricting commission is expected to reverse the state's heavily partisan Republican gerrymander, but it's not clear how that state's map will shake out. Colorado also has an independent commission that will likely add a Democratic seat, according to Wang, but Oregon's bipartisan process is expected to cancel that out with an additional Republican seat. Montana's new seat (doubling the state's House delegation from one to two) will almost certainly favor Republicans, and North Carolina's Republican-led legislature is also likely to add a favorable seat, although the state's districting maps have faced numerous legal challenges in recent years.

That means few changes to the makeup of Congress across those states, leaving Republican-led Texas and Florida as the major question marks.

Texas's all-Republican state government will almost certainly try to draw two new favorable seats, but Wang warned that may prove challenging. The Lone Star State's map is already heavily tilted toward the GOP, while rapid demographic changes increasingly threaten to unseat Republicans in previously favorable districts.

Florida's Republican government is expected to try to add a favorable seat but that effort could be challenged under Florida's new "Fair Districts" requirement approved by voters. Since the state's Supreme Court is all Republican, however, advocates have been skeptical that law will actually be enforced.

"Republicans seem likely to get a net advantage from redistricting. But it's mainly because of single-party redistricting in states like Florida and North Carolina," Wang wrote on Twitter.

The Cook Political Report projects that Republicans will gain three to four additional House seats from the next round of redistricting.

"The most predictable effect of redistricting is that red states' delegations are likely to get redder and blue states bluer," Wasserman wrote on Twitter, "meaning the nation's political conditions are likely to continue to deteriorate."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

wilbur/trump trying to move up /close census tho covid means it wd take LONGER

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trumps-commerce-secretary-might-be-facing-contempt-charges-for-violating-judges-us-census-order-reporters/

dirty tricks gerry

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-dirty-republican-plan-to-cut-the-census-short-is-potentially-illegal/

authoritarian to use levers of pwr in election

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/voting-rights-roundup-delay-in-2020-census-data-release-could-heavily-disrupt-redistricting-process/

djt caves, but get data from big gov't dB to gerry

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/voting-rights-expert-responds-to-trumps-citizenship-announcement-goal-is-to-shift-power-to-white-gop-areas/

cooch says data is disaggregated so not useful to ICE?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-trump-administration-has-changed-its-story-on-the-census-citizenship-question-10-times-in-the-last-4-months/

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/172411

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/john-roberts-will-wreck-democracy-if-trump-gets-out-of-his-way/

no lnx

John Roberts will wreck democracy — if Trump gets out of his way

written by Sophia Tesfaye / Salon June 28, 2019

A pair of rulings handed down by the Supreme Court on the last day of its current session shows just how muchChief Justice John Roberts has overseen the slow destruction of the democratic process in this country over the last decade.

Since assuming the center seat on the nation’s highest court in 2005, Roberts has ruled in favor of unlimited corporate spending in political elections and against enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. This week he added allowing partisan gerrymandering to continue and at least a potential citizenship question on the census, an obvious attempt to intimidate non-citizens and immigrants out of participating.

Yes, technically Roberts joined with the court’s four “liberal” justices in a complex 5-4 decision on whether the Trump administration can ask all recipients a citizenship question on the 2020 census for the first time since 1950. But his ruling isn’t anything to get excited about. Quite the contrary.

The question, which critics say would further reduce the already low Hispanic participation rate, had been blocked by numerous federal courts. The Trump administration had claimed it was necessary to better comply with federal voting rights law.

“There’s no evidence in this record that the secretary [of Commerce] would have asked this question had the Department of Justice not requested it,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco argued in court.

But there was plenty of evidence to suggest that this question was fed to the Trump campaign team around the time of the election by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a notorious advocate of voter suppression tactics. It likely came through former Trump campaign CEO and White House adviser Steve Bannon, before landing in the lap of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the census. The administration simply lied about all that.

Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., asked Ross during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing last year, “Has the president or anyone in the White House discussed with you or anyone on your team about adding the citizenship question?”

Ross replied: “I am not aware of any such.”

His lawyers later admitted, however, that “Secretary Ross recalls that [Steve] Bannon called Secretary Ross in the Spring of 2017 to ask Secretary Ross if he would be willing to speak to then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobachabout Secretary Kobach’s ideas about a possible citizenship question on the decennial census,” despite initial claims that Ross could not “confirm that the Secretary spoke to Steve Bannon regarding the Citizenship Question.”

In a July 2017 email to Ross, Kobach proposed wording for a citizenship question. He complained that “aliens who do not actually ‘reside’ in the United States are still counted” in the census numbers used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets. This is ludicrous on its face: You do not have to be a citizen of a given country to “reside” within it.

The evidence is damning and difficult to ignore — but if the Trump administration had not blatantly lied to Roberts’ face, they probably would have gotten away with it.

“The sole stated reason” for the citizenship question, Roberts wrote in his opinion, “seems to have been contrived. We are presented, in other words, with an explanation for agency action that is incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decisionmaking process.”

The decision remands the case to lower courts to be reconsidered. The census wasn’t saved by the Supreme Court, but by Trump’s incompetence. Roberts essentially stated that the citizenship question was legitimate — but that the government had to come up with a better excuse for it.

The U.S. census has never been about how many people are citizens or eligible voters in a given area. It’s about a much simpler question: How many people live there. Adding the citizenship question, in light of the evidence that it would depress response rates, only serves as a direct contradiction of the census’ principal purpose. Congress has directed the Census Bureau to spend no more on the 2020 Census than it did in 2010 when, according to the government’s reports, Latinos were undercounted by 1.5 percent and African-Americans by nearly 2 percent.

The Trump administration argued in court that there was not enough evidence that the question would decrease the response rate to block the question. (Research from the Census Bureau itself strongly suggests otherwise.) The administration also previously told the court that the questionnaire needed to be printed by the end of June — which you will notice is upon us. No doubt the government will now concede that the real deadline is October, as the challengers to the question have long argued. Roberts is merely inviting the administration to come back with a better lie.

Under Roberts’ tenure, the court’s conservative justices have previously provided free legal advice to favor certain outcomes. For instances, they asked the Trump administration come back several times with modifications to its so-called travel ban, so that the court could pretend it was something other than a “Muslim ban.” In the infamous Citizens United case, the Roberts court had the plaintiff reframe demands in order for the conservatives to rule on the case they wanted, rather than the one actually in front of them.

Unfortunately for the Trump administration, even with a second bite of the apple on the census question, this case is likely to face even more scrutiny.

As a federal trial judge in Maryland ruled earlier this month, new evidence presented after oral arguments had been heard by the Supreme Court had raised “a substantial issue.” The recently revealed evidence shows just how racist the basis for this entire question actually was.

The late GOP redistricting strategist Thomas Hofeller played a substantial role in adding the citizenship question, according to documents uncovered after his death. Hofeller argued that adding a citizenship question would depress Hispanic response rates, thereby allowing states to redraw districts that boosted “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites” to an unfair electoral advantage for years to come.

The Supreme Court did not initially consider the Hofeller evidence, which did not emerge until the case had been argued, but the evidence of racial bias will indisputably be part of the record the second time around. In a blatant attempt to stop congressional oversight on this front, the Justice Department on recently threatened to invoke presidential powers to withhold the documents on its efforts to add the citizenship question, unless House Democrats backed off their threats to hold Ross in contempt of Congress. So far, Democrats haven’t blink.

In light of an earlier ruling by Roberts, the census case is merely a temporary failure and another example of a rookie mistake by Trump.

Before handing down his surprise decision in the census case, Roberts ruled alongside the other four justices appointed by Republicans to allow partisan gerrymandering to go unchallenged in federal court. This essentially guarantees that the political party that controls a statehouse can draw voting districts however it wishes, without intervention.

“For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent. “Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”

The ramifications of this decision will be felt for decades to come all over the country. There’s ample evidence that Republicans in office have pursued gerrymandered maps to shut out people of color or other groups likely to vote Democratic — either by carving them up and dispersing them, or by concentrating them into as few districts as possible.

John Roberts, who gave Republicans a green light to install legislative majorities against the will of the people — and may yet allow them yet another tool to keep power through the census — seeks to convey a sense of consensus, as biographer Joan Biskupic notes. Supreme Court justices “do not sit on opposite sides of an aisle, we do not caucus in separate rooms, and we do not serve one party or one interest. We serve one nation,” Roberts insisted last October.

But as Nse Ufot, the executive director of New Georgia Project, the nonprofit voter engagement group founded by Stacey Abrams, notes: “Justice Roberts is hiding behind the concept of federalism. They’re using the separation of powers and branches of government as a pretext for attacking civil rights. They have a sacred duty to uphold the Constitution. [The 2013 decision to overturn parts of the Voting Rights Act] told us everything we needed to know about the Roberts Court and their hostility toward civil rights and voting rights.”

Roberts wrote both of Thursday’s majority opinions. This is his project, and it’s not over.

related to gerry

Huge victory for the Republican Party’: Legal experts weigh in on Supreme Court’s landmark gerrymandering decision

Alex Henderson

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on gerrymandering, deciding that federal courts cannot block lawmakers in individual states from partisan gerrymandering in political districts. And legal experts have been weighing…

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/fox-news-andrew-napolitano-explains-why-the-census-ruling-is-a-significant-defeat-for-trump-personally/

bad for djt b/c can't be adjudicated in time for 2020?!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/supreme-court-sends-census-citizenship-case-back-to-lower-court-after-bombshell-evidence-reveals-gops-true-motives/

no lnx

Supreme Court sends census citizenship case back to lower court after bombshell evidence reveals GOP’s true motives

STEPHEN WOLF / DAILY KOS

27 JUN 2019

In a surprise decision that will help preserve fair political representation, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from adding a question to the 2020 census asking U.S. residents about their citizenship status, instead sending the case back to lower court for it to explore explosive new evidence behind the GOP’s motives for including the question.

The addition of this citizenship question would have likely had a chilling effect, intimidating millions of people in immigrant communities into not participating in the census. That in turn would haveturbocharged a new wave of hyperpartisan Republican gerrymandering nationwide, since census data is the bedrock of redistricting.

This impact was in fact the entire rationale behind this question: In a recent bombshell report, based on newly unearthed documents from a deceased GOP political consultant, Thomas Hofeller, Republicans admitted that rigging the census would eviscerate the political power of Democrats and voters of color.

The Constitution mandates that every person in the U.S. be counted in the decennial census, without regard to their legal status. A question on citizenship hasn’t been included in the census since 1950, and even when it has appeared, it has never been asked of every single participant, as the Trump administration intended it to be in 2020. Furthermore, multiple lower courts had ruled that Trump’s attempt to add the question violated both federal law and the Constitution.

Those courts uniformly dismissed the Trump administration’s claim that the Justice Department needed data on citizenship to enforce the Voting Rights Act as a bogus pretext that masked their true motives. Hofeller’s document trove revealed the GOP’s racist and partisan intent: allowing mapmakers to use citizenship statistics result in “a disadvantage to the Democrats” and to be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”

Although the Census Bureau had planned to print millions of census forms in July, plaintiffs argued that it could delay printing until October to give the courts time to resolve the case. Now, the case will go back to the federal district court in New York that originally heard the matter. That will allow the judge to conduct an in-depth review of the new evidence and craft a ruling that addresses the Trump administration’s racial and partisan animus. In the likely event that the lower court once again blocks the question, the Supreme Court may let such a ruling stand following its latest decision.

Given the blatant display of partisan and racial bigotry behind the GOP’s plans, this ruling averted a major blow to democracy that would have rivaled the harms of both 2000’s Bush v. Gore decision and the 2013 ruling that crippled the Voting Rights Act. Although the Supreme Court’s Republican majority has advanced an increasingly partisan agenda that undermines the rule of law, Trump’s malicious effort to weaponize the census simply proved to be too extreme for the court to accept.

mma

Saturday, there was another mass shooting at a synagogue. A man opened fire inside the Chabad synagogue in Powoy, CA, just outside of San Diego. NBC's Ben Collins and Andrew Blankstein reported that an open letter was posted on far-right forum 8chan in the shooters name, which also took credit for an unsolved arson of a nearby mosque. According to the San Diego County Sheriff, the alleged shooter is now being investigated for that arson as well.

Over at Bellingcat, Robert Evans took a deep dive into 8chan, which was also the place where the Christchurch mosque shooter posted his manifesto. Media Matters' Cristina López has previously written about how board users launch harassment campaigns using 8chan. 8chan is also the hub of the QAnon conspiracy theory which has swept pro-Trump media; a number of prominent right-wing figures have amplified that conspiracy theory. And board users absolutely love Sean Hannity.

Over at The New York Times, Charlie Warzel wrote about how these mass shootings have become a meme in the far-right internet: "The pattern is eerie: it starts with a crude genealogy of the shooter’s ethnic roots, then a self-aggrandizing Q. and A. with himself, followed by a litany of toxic in-jokes meant to confuse the media and those less savvy in far-right online culture. ... Like the Christchurch massacre, the Poway shooting is not only tailored for the internet but also sickeningly standardized. The digital footprint and manifestoes of these white nationalist terrorists follow a familiar template — one that each shooter fills in with their own hideous details. Indeed, it seems real-world murderous hate crimes have become a message board meme of sorts. And like any online meme, the creation cycle only seems to be accelerating, refining itself and, horrifyingly, increasing in frequency."

On Fox News, a guest was linking the rise of anti-Semitism to Trump's permissive rhetoric about the far right, specifically Trump's defense of white nationalists in Charlottesville who chanted "Jews will not replace us." (Trump even doubled down on that characterization on Friday in an interview with Mark Levin.) But as the guest described this, the show suddenly cut to commercial. The guest was invited back on later in the day, but the discussion moved quickly beyond Trump's rhetoric to an assertion that Trump could not possibly be personally anti-Semitic.

Fox News never stopped pushing the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that motivated the Tree of Life shooter. Glenn Beck was on Fox News earlier this month pushing it. And earlier this week, a Fox Nation guest fearmongered about_{George Soros infiltrating the census}_, harkening back to when a guest was banned from the network for complaining about the "Soros-occupied State Department."

random? eg robt r

Supreme Court heard arguments today on theTrump administration’s decision to alter the 2020 Census to ask people if they are American citizens.

In a former life, I argued cases before the Supreme Court. From what I gathered today, it looks as if the five Republican appointees to the Court have already decided this move by Trump is constitutional.

But it’s not. The U.S. Constitution calls for “actual enumeration” of the total population for an explicit purpose: To count the residents – not just citizens, residents – of every state to properly allocate congressional representatives to the states based on population.

Asking whether someone is a citizen is likely to cause some immigrants — not just non-citizens, but also those with family members or close friends who aren’t citizens — not to respond for fear that they or their loved ones would be deported. In the current climate of fear, this isn’t an irrational response.

The result would be a systemic undercounting of immigrant communities. The Census Bureau has already calculated that it’s likely to result in a 5.1 percent undercount of noncitizen households.

This would have two grossly unfair results.

In the first place, these communities and the states they’re in would get less federal aid. Census data is used in over 132 programs nationwide to allocate over $675 billion each year.

An undercount would deprive many immigrant communities and their states of the health care, education and assistance they need and are entitled to.

Secondly, these communities and the states they’re in would have fewer representatives in Congress. The Census count determines the distribution of congressional seats among states. Under the Constitution, these seats depend on the total number of people residing in the state, not just citizens.

Which is the real reason for this move by the Trump administration.

It’s no secret that immigrants with the right to vote tend to vote for Democrats. So undercounting neighborhoods that are heavily Latino or Asian would mean fewer Democratic members of Congress.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross says the citizenship question is necessary in order to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.

Baloney. The Trump administration has shown zero interest in the Voting Rights Act. It has even defended voter suppression laws in court.

This is nothing but a Republican power grab orchestrated by the White House.

If Chief Justice John Roberts sides with his four Republican colleagues on this, the ruling will be the third in a series of landmark 5-to-4 Roberts Court decisions whose main purpose is to cement Republican control of federal and state governments.

The first and second were “Shelby County in 2013, which gutted the 1965 Civil Rights Act, and last year’s Janus decision, declaring that public employees don’t have to pay union dues.

Mitch McConnell’s long-term strategy of packing the Court in order to entrench the Republican Party is becoming an obscene reality.