Republicans sends out scam Census ahead of the actual 2020 Census.

mysunnyboy said:

I think he’s in on the Iowa app debacle.

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hanimmal said:

'Someone' posted on 4Chan to Trump supporters to flood the phone lines on election night so the results could not get reported because they couldn't get through. I don't for a second doubt it was someone attached to Brad Parscale.

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ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Census Bureau for the time being to stop following a plan that would have had it winding down operations in order to finish the 2020 census at the end of September.

The federal judge in San Jose late Saturday issued a temporary restraining order against the Census Bureau and the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency. The order stops the Census Bureau from winding down operations until a court hearing is held on Sept. 17.

The once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident helps determine how $1.5 trillion in federal funding is distributed and how many congressional seats each state gets in a process known as apportionment.

The temporary restraining order was requested by a coalition of cities, counties and civil rights groups that had sued the Census Bureau, demanding it restore its previous plan for finishing the census at the end of October, instead of using a revised plan to end operations at the end of September. The coalition had argued the earlier deadline would cause the Census Bureau to overlook minority communities in the census, leading to an inaccurate count.

In her order, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh wrote that previous court cases had concluded that it’s in the public interest that Congress be fairly apportioned and that the federal funds be distributed using an accurate census.

“Thus, the balance of the hardships and public interest tip sharply in Plaintiffs’ favor,” Koh said.

In a message emailed to regional offices and headquarters, the Census Bureau said the statistical agency and the Commerce Department “are obligated to comply with the Court’s Order and are taking immediate steps to do so.” Further guidance would be provided later, the bureau said.

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The texts from an Alabama census supervisor had an urgent tone. “THIS JUST IN ...,” one of them began. It then laid out how census takers should fake data to mark households as having only one resident even if they had no idea how many people actually lived there.

The goal of the texts from October, obtained by The Associated Press, was to check off as many households as possible on the list of homes census takers were supposed to visit because residents never had filled out census questionnaires. The supervisor wanted the census takers to finalize cases — without interviewing households — as the Trump administration waged a legal battle to end the once-a-decade head count early.

The texts are the latest evidence suggesting census accuracy was sacrificed for speed as census takers and supervisors rushed to complete a head count last month. Critics contend the schedule was shortened by two weeks so the Trump administration could enforce a presidential order excluding people in the country illegally from the numbers used for apportionment of congressional districts.

The texted instructions said that if two failed attempts were made to interview members of the households, along with two unsuccessful tries to interview landlords or neighbors about the homes’ residents, then the census takers should mark that a single person lived there.

“You are to clear the case indicating occupied by 1,” said the text from the census supervisor in the small city of Dothan, Alabama.

The texts were shared with the AP by a census taker from Florida who traveled to Alabama among groups of enumerators dispatched to areas lagging behind in the count. The existence of the texts suggests that falsification of census data may be more widespread than previously known.

The census taker who provided the texts asked for anonymity because of privacy concerns and said she refused to follow the texted guidance because she felt doing so would falsify data. She declined to name the supervisor, who was identified only by her first name in screenshots of the texts seen by the AP.

The U.S. Census Bureau has denied any attempts to systemically falsify information during the 2020 census, which is vital to determining the allocation of congressional seats and federal spending. But the AP has chronicled similar instructions sent to census takers in other U.S. regions.

Census Bureau spokesman Michael Cook said the agency is investigating the Alabama case and has not identified any data irregularities. When there appear to be problems with data collection, the bureau can take steps such as revisiting households to improve accuracy, he said.

“We take falsification allegations very seriously,” Cook said.

More than two dozen census takers and supervisors have contacted the AP since the beginning of the month, telling similar stories about corners cut in the rush to close cases as the Trump administration sought to end the census before the Oct. 31 deadline set in response to the pandemic.

The most recent cases also include a census supervisor in Baltimore who said that thousands of addresses were manually marked completed without evidence that residents had been interviewed.

The Alabama supervisor in her text included a photo of her hand-written instructions listing the 15 steps she said would allow the census takers to mark in their bureau-issued iPhones that only one person lived in a home without interviewing anyone about the household’s demographic makeup or the number of people living there.

The supervisor also recommended performing the steps two to three hours after trying to interview members of a household to avoid arousing suspicions from higher-ups who could track where census takers had been through their IPhones.

The instructions for the census takers in Alabama were sent a week before the Supreme Court made a ruling that allowed the Trump administration to end field operations for the 2020 census on Oct. 15 instead of Oct 31.

The Census Bureau has said it compiled information for about 99.9% of U.S. households in the U.S. during field operations. At the height of the door-knocking phase of the census in mid-August, there were more than 285,000 temporary census takers on the bureau’s payroll.

In Baltimore, census supervisor Amanda Colianni said she believes 5,300 cases in neighborhoods she managed were closed prematurely and removed from the door-knocking effort after only one attempt by census takers to interview members of households in mid-to-late September. The Census Bureau was working toward what officials believed at the time would be an Oct. 5 early finish for the count.

Colianni said she does not know why the cases were removed or how they were resolved, though she says it’s possible that government administrative records were used to fill in the information gaps when detailed records from the IRS, the Social Security Administration or other agencies existed for the households.

An outside census advisory group warned this month that filling in large numbers of households with administrative data late in the census process suggests no high quality data existed for the addresses. If that had been the case, the group said, it would have been used earlier to save census takers time.

“I know the management level in Baltimore was trying to push, push, push to get everything done,” Colianni said. “There was no possible way we could have any semblance of a reasonable completion rate by Oct. 5.”

Colianni filed statements with the Commerce Department’s Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel and a coalition of local governments and advocacy groups that have sued the Trump administration over its attempts to shorten the 2020 census schedule. The coalition’s case led to the Supreme Court decision allowing the Trump administration to end the head count.

The coalition’s lawsuit in San Jose, California said the deadline for finishing the count was changed from the end of October to the end of September to ensure that number-crunching for the census would take place while President Donald Trump was still in office, no matter the outcome of the presidential race.

That could guarantee the enforcement of an order Trump issued in July seeking to exclude people in the country illegally from numbers used to determine congressional seat distribution. Trump’s order has been found unlawful by three courts — in New York, California and Maryland. The Justice Department is appealing.

Whether the Census Bureau can meet a Dec. 31 deadline for turning in the apportionment numbers to Trump is now in jeopardy after the agency said Thursday that it found anomalies in the data during the numbers-crunching phase.

The coalition contesting the early end to the count is seeking to extend the numbers-crunching phase of the census from the end of December to the end of next April, especially since the Census Bureau is relying on large numbers of administrative records to fill in gaps from data collection.

Lawyers for the coalition have said they have documented other cases of census takers being instructed to cut corners and fudge numbers in order to close cases.

“Shortening data-processing operations will prevent the Bureau from finding and fixing these errors, as the Bureau itself has acknowledged,” their lawsuit said.

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hanimmal said:

https://apnews.com/article/alabama-census-2020-b0ecdec4d6fa4fe3a0989e5702c528ce
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LAS VEGAS (AP) — The swanky, billion-dollar casinos of Las Vegas are bedecked with shining towers, neon signs and eye-popping extravagance. But directly beneath the glitter, hundreds of homeless people live out of sight, in the dark, in a network of stormwater tunnels running below the city.

When census takers tried in September to count the nation’s homeless for the 2020 census, safety concerns prevented them from venturing into the Las Vegas tunnels.

The tunnels offer just one example of the difficulty in counting the portion of the homeless population that does not stay in shelters. A half dozen census takers around the U.S. told The Associated Press that they experienced problems that could cause the homeless to be undercounted — a situation that may cost some communities political representation and federal money.

America DePasquale, who lived in the tunnels from May 2018 until she moved into a detox facility last month, said she never saw census takers visit the area underneath the Las Vegas Strip.

DePasquale said she does not blame census takers for not attempting to enter the tunnels, but she said it might have helped if they had tried to go with community advocates who make frequent visits below.

“It takes somebody of a certain strength to go down there just regularly, “ she said. ”But I also find it kind of appalling that they wouldn’t go deeper and at least even try.”

The count of the unsheltered homeless was originally scheduled for last spring, but the Census Bureau delayed it until late September because of concerns about the coronavirus. The bureau identified 33,000 homeless camps for census takers to visit.

The Government Accountability Office warned earlier this month that the delay in the homeless count could affect the quality of the census data given the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. People who may have answered the census questionnaire last spring but later became homeless may not be recorded as homeless and may be living in a different place, the watchdog agency said in a report.

“Because people who experience homelessness are more likely than people who are housed to be members of minority groups, especially African Americans and Native Americans, the undercount contributes, modestly, to the serious undercount of minorities and poor people,” said Beth Shinn, a professor at Vanderbilt University who researches homelessness.

In San Francisco, a census taker said supervisors were confused about what to do and where to go. In Oklahoma City, many census takers did only a headcount without interviewing homeless people, so they missed gathering demographic information.

A census taker in Bakersfield, California, said a list of homeless sites they were given was outdated, and they were not allowed to interview people who appeared to be homeless if their locations were not on the list. Census takers were prevented from doing any counts in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, because of racial injustice protests that were happening on the same night.

Deanna Helm, a census taker who participated in the homeless count in Northern California, characterized it as “a farce.”

“We were just chasing our tails that night,” she said.

Rainy weather in Spokane, Washington, kept enumerators like Joanne McCoy from doing their jobs.

“We didn’t get a good count at all. It should have been much better,” said McCoy, a census supervisor.

The Census Bureau said in a statement that the unsheltered homeless count is designed with the safety of census takers and those being counted in mind.

“As in previous censuses, the primary goal, and noted in census taker instructions, is to first get a headcount of people experiencing homelessness,” the statement said. “We do not want to create an unsafe environment for those living at the location or our census takers, so we may not conduct a full interview if it is unsafe to do so.”

The agency’s once-a-decade count helps determine $1.5 trillion in federal spending annually and how many congressional seats each state gets.

In Las Vegas, concerns about the homeless count were raised last October at a city council meeting. Las Vegas, along with surrounding Clark County, has an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 people living on the streets. The homeless population could be larger, since shelters are operating at reduced capacity because of pandemic restrictions, said then-City Manager Scott Adams.

“The bottom line is ... we could be undercounted by several thousand people in the city population,” Adams said. “Why is that important? It deals with apportionment for legislative seats, formula shares for federal funding, a whole range of issues.”

Census takers would face a lot of challenges if they tried to enter the tunnels on their own to interview residents, said Paul Vautrinot, who leads Shine a Light, a nonprofit that provides housing, counseling and other services to several hundred people living in the tunnels.

Drug use is common and conspicuous, according to community advocates who make regular trips into the dank passages to donate food and supplies. Hypodermic needles, rats and human waste are common sights, as is the low, steady flow of water through the tunnels. Some tunnels have mini-communities where a dozen or two dozen people set up tents or beds and share communal meals. Those who prefer solitude find their own section in the labyrinth.

Some people have few belongings. Others have relatively elaborate setups, with furniture or generators.

When Clark County runs an annual count of the homeless population required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, staff and volunteer counters have a police escort. That effort is less intensive than the once-a-decade census and requires only a headcount, not a questionnaire.

Most people living in the subterranean channels would not be interested in speaking to strangers asking questions about their backgrounds, even though it might help bring resources to people living there, Vautrinot said.

“It’s a very daunting task to go walking down there, even after having done this for as long as I have and having lived there,” said Vautrinot, who lived in the tunnels from 2011 to 2014. “There are moments that you go down there and the hair on your arm raises up.”

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Battered by criticism that the 2020 census was dangerously politicized by the Trump administration, the U.S. Census Bureau under a new Biden administration has the tall task of restoring confidence in the numbers that will be used to determine funding and political power.

Picking up the pieces of a long, fractious process that spooled out during a global pandemic starts with transparency about irregularities in the data, former Census Bureau directors, lawmakers and advocates said.

They advised the new administration to take more time to review and process population figures to be sure they get them right. The high-stakes undertaking will determine how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets as well as the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending each year.

“We are optimistic that things at the Census Bureau will be better. The question is whether the damage caused by the Trump administration can be rectified,” said Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League. Morial’s organization, along with other advocacy groups and municipalities, sued former President Donald Trump’s administration last year over a decision to end the once-a-decade head count early.

According to critics, that damage includes a failed effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire and a Trump order to figure out who is a citizen and who is in the U.S. illegally. They say another Trump directive to exclude people in the country illegally from the apportionment of congressional seats, shortened schedules to collect and process data, and four political appointments to top positions inside the bureau also threatened the count’s integrity.

Full Coverage: Census 2020

Census workers across the country have told The Associated Press and other media outlets that they were encouraged to falsify responses in the rush to finish the count so the numbers used for determining how many congressional seats each state gets could be produced under the Trump administration. Census Bureau officials said such problems were isolated.

Census advocates were heartened Wednesday by President Joe Biden’s quick revocations of Trump’s order to produce citizenship data and the former president’s memo attempting to exclude people in the U.S. illegally from the apportionment count. The Biden administration also has pledged to give the Census Bureau the time it needs to process the data.

“President Biden’s swift action today finally closes the book on the Trump administration’s attempts to manipulate the census for political gain,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, who argued against the legality of the apportionment memo before the Supreme Court last year. The high court ruled that any challenge was premature.

After the bureau missed a year-end deadline for turning in the apportionment numbers, it said the figures would be completed as close to the previous deadline as possible. Trump administration attorneys recently said they won’t be ready until early March because the bureau needs time to fix irregularities in the data.

There will be flaws, likely undercounts of communities of color and overcounts of whites, but “they will just have to ‘bake the best cake possible’ through identifying and correcting the errors they can find,” said Rob Santos, president of the American Statistical Association.

Still, Arturo Vargas, CEO of the NALEO Educational Fund, said he’s worried about the accuracy of the data on the nation’s Latino population because the Trump administration’s efforts created widespread distrust that may have discouraged participation.

Trump’s four political appointments to the Census Bureau last year were denounced by statisticians and Democratic lawmakers worried they would politicize the once-a-decade head count. The Office of Inspector General last week said two of them had pressured bureau workers to figure out who is in the U.S. illegally before Trump left office, with one whistleblower calling the effort “statistically indefensible.” Then-Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham ordered a technical report on that effort but halted it after blowback. He resigned this week after Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups called for his departure.

The bureau’s new interim chief, Deputy Director Ron Jarmin, didn’t respond to a request for an interview. He will report to Biden’s new pick to head the Commerce Department — which oversees the Census Bureau — Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo.

Former Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt said he’s optimistic the final product will be as accurate as past censuses, especially now that Jarmin is at the helm.

“They know how to do it right. It just takes time,” said Prewitt, who served in the Clinton administration.

Another former bureau director, John Thompson, said the exit of Trump’s appointees will help eliminate distractions to finishing the 2020 census, but the agency needs to hold a public forum to discuss what anomalies bureau statisticians have found in the data and what they’re doing to fix them ahead of the apportionment numbers being turned in.

“Clearly, confidence in the census has been shaken,” said Thompson, who led the agency during part of the Obama administration.

U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, asked Biden to set up a nonpartisan commission to review the apportionment data to make sure it’s fair and accurate before it’s delivered to the House of Representatives.

“The Census Bureau faced a number of challenges with the 2020 Census,” Schatz said in a letter. “Some, like the pandemic, were beyond the agency’s control. However, the Trump Administration actively interfered with the agency’s operations.”

Despite facing pressures from their political bosses, the Census Bureau’s career staff did a good job of resisting the Trump administration’s most questionable orders by coming forward when they found errors in the data without worrying about the deadline and by whistleblowing to the inspector general when they felt pressured to produce citizenship of dubious accuracy, according to Morial, Santos and Thompson.

“They deserve to be honored,” Santos said.

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More than a year since the 2020 census began in a remote Alaska village, the first numbers to emerge from the nation’s once-a-decade head count were released on Monday, showing how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state is getting based on its population.

Because the number of seats in the House of Representatives is set at 435, it’s a zero-sum game with one state’s gain resulting in another state’s loss — like a pie with uneven slices. As one state gets a larger slice because of population gains, that means a smaller slice for a state that lost population or didn’t grow as much.

A look at the 13 states that will gain or lose political power — and federal money — through the apportionment process because of changes in population over the past decade:

THE WINNERS

TEXAS — The Longhorn State is the big winner, adding two congressional seats courtesy of 4 million new residents. Demographers say people moving from other states like California have contributed a significant chunk of the growth. The nation’s second most populous state will now have 38 congressional representatives, behind only California.

FLORIDA — The nation’s third most populous state adds one congressional seat because of a population gain of more than 2.7 million. This boosts its House delegation to 28 and Electoral College votes to 30, furthering the Sunshine State’s importance in presidential elections.

COLORADO — Population growth around Denver helped Colorado gain an extra seat, its first new House seat in 20 years. The mostly college-educated transplants have helped Colorado go from being a solidly Republican state to a competitive swing state to, now, a solidly Democratic one — though the state’s districts will be drawn by a nonpartisan commission.

MONTANA — By gaining a congressional seat, Montana goes from having a single House representative to having two. The gain marks a rebound for Montana, which had two congressional seats for most of the 20th century but lost one after the 1990 census.

NORTH CAROLINA — Fueled by retirees and job seekers, North Carolina’s population boom is earning it an extra seat, raising its House count to 14. The gains have been concentrated in the Charlotte and Raleigh areas.

OREGON — Oregon is getting a new congressional seat for the first time in 40 years, going from five House members to six. Although Democrats control state government, they have agreed to give up their advantage in redrawing the state’s political districts for the next 10 years in exchange for a commitment from Republicans to stop blocking bills.

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THE LOSERS

CALIFORNIA — While California is still the nation’s most populous state, its stagnant growth over the past decade causes it to lose a single seat for the first time in 170 years of statehood. Its number of House members goes from 53 to 52 for a state that has been a symbol of limitless growth and endless possibilities since the Gold Rush of the 1800s.

ILLINOIS — Illinois goes from 18 to 17 House members, continuing a 40-year streak of losing congressional seats.

MICHIGAN — The number of House members representing Michigan drops from 14 to 13, particularly because of population losses in the Upper Peninsula.

NEW YORK — There was no question New York was going to lose a congressional seat, but the suspense lay in whether it would be one or two seats. The Census Bureau says New York lost its seat by a mere 89 people. The loss of one seat reduces its House delegation from 27 to 26 members.

OHIO — Sluggish population growth over the past decade causes Ohio to lose a single congressional seat, continuing its streak of losses every decade since 1960. The adjustment reduces the Buckeye State’s House seats from 16 to 15.

PENNSYLVANIA — Although Pennsylvania remains an important presidential battleground, its influence will be diminished by the loss of one Electoral College vote. Its House delegation drops from 18 to 17 members.

WEST VIRGINIA — A decadeslong exodus of residents finally causes West Virginia to lose a congressional seat, reducing its representation in the House from three to two members.

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Census Bureau statisticians and outside experts are trying to unravel a mystery: Why were so many questions about households in the 2020 census left unanswered?

Residents did not respond to a multitude of questions about sex, race, Hispanic background, family relationships and age, even when providing a count of the number of people living in the home, according to documents released by the agency. Statisticians had to fill in the gaps.

Reflecting an early stage in the number crunching, the documents show that 10% to 20% of questions were not answered in the 2020 census, depending on the question and state. According to the Census Bureau, later phases of processing show the actual rates were lower.

The rates have averaged 1% to 3% in 170 years of previous U.S. censuses, according to University of Minnesota demographer Steven Ruggles.

The information is important because data with demographic details will be used for drawing congressional and legislative districts. That data, which the Census Bureau will release Thursday, also is used to distribute $1.5 trillion in federal spending each year.

The documents, made public in response to an open records request from a Republican redistricting advocacy group, don’t shed much light on why questions were left unanswered, though theories abound. Some observers say software used in the first census in which most Americans could respond online allowed people to skip questions. Others say the pandemic made it harder to reach people who didn’t respond.

Confusion over some questions, including traditional uncertainty among Hispanics about how to answer the race question, may have been a factor, but some experts hint at a more sinister possibility. They say the Trump administration’s attempt to end the count early and failed efforts to put a citizenship question on the form and exclude people who were in the U.S. illegally had a chilling effect.

“I think it’s the pandemic and Trump. The very threat that citizenship was on the questionnaire, the very notion it might have been on it, may have deterred some Latinos from filling it out,” said Andrew Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College and the City University of New York Graduate School and University Center. “I think a lot of us are flabbergasted by it. It is a very high number.”

Ruggles initially thought it had to do with the software used by people who answered online — about two-thirds of U.S. households. Other countries such as Australia and Canada, which have used similar software for censuses, saw the number of unanswered questions drop to almost zero because respondents couldn’t proceed if they didn’t answer a question.

“I guess in the U.S. version they must just have accepted incomplete responses,” Ruggles said. “If the non-response rate was consistently high across response mode, that is just strange.”

Acting Census Bureau Director Ron Jarmin said recently in a blog post that the blank answers spanned all categories of questions and all modes of responding — online, by paper, by phone or face-to-face interviews.

“These blank responses left holes in the data which we had to fill,” Jarmin said.

In a statement last week to The Associated Press, Jarmin declined to go into details, saying only that the bureau would release updated rates later this month “based on the correct numbers.”

To fill in the holes, Census Bureau statisticians searched other administrative records such as tax forms, Social Security card applications or previous censuses to find people’s race, age, sex and Hispanic background.

If available records didn’t turn up the information needed, they turned to the statistical technique called imputation that the Census Bureau has used for 60 years. The technique has been challenged and upheld in courts after past censuses.

In some cases, statisticians looked for information answered about one member of a family, such as race, and applied it to another member that had blank answers. Or they assigned a sex based on the respondent’s first name. In other cases, when the entire household had no information, they filled it in using data of similar neighbors.

“Imputation has been shown to improve data quality and accuracy compared to leaving these fields blank, or without information from respondents,” Census Bureau officials Roberto Ramirez and Christine Borman wrote recently in a blog post.

The Census Bureau in April released state population totals from the 2020 census. Those are used to divvy up the number of congressional seats in each state during a once-a-decade process known as apportionment.

The agency released a slide deck presentation about the high rate of unanswered questions, along with group housing records and the first details about the rate of non-responses, in response to an open records request from Fair Lines American Foundation. The Republican advocacy group sued the Census Bureau for information about how the count was conducted in dorms, prisons, nursing homes and other places where people live in groups. Fair Lines says it’s concerned about the accuracy of the group housing count and wants to make sure anomalies didn’t affect the state population figures.

With the information showing high rates of imputation, some Republican-controlled states may try to leave college students out of redistricting data, claiming they were also counted at their parents’ homes, to get a partisan edge, said Jeffrey Wice, a Democratic redistricting expert.

“That will be hard to prove but would inject more uncertainty and possible delay into redistricting,” Wice said.

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The Census Bureau on Thursday issued its long-awaited portrait of how the U.S. has changed over the past decade, releasing a trove of demographic data that will be used to redraw political maps across an increasingly diverse country. The data will also shape how $1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed each year.

Here are five takeaways from the latest census figures:

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WHITE POPULATION DECLINED FOR FIRST TIME ON RECORD

A U.S. headcount has been carried out every decade since 1790, and this was the first one in which the non-Hispanic white population nationwide got smaller, shrinking from 196 million in 2010 to 191 million in 2020.

The data also shows the share of the white population fell from 63.7% in 2010 to 57.8% in 2020, the lowest on record, though white people continue to be the most prevalent racial or ethnic group. In California, Hispanics became the largest racial or ethnic group, growing to 39.4% from 37.6% over the decade, while the share of white people dropped from 40.1% to 34.7%.

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THE U.S. BECAME MORE URBAN

Almost all of the growth of the past 10 years happened in metropolitan areas. More people in smaller counties moved to larger counties. Around 80% of metropolitan areas saw population gains, while less than half of the smaller so-called micropolitan areas did.

Phoenix was the fastest-growing of the nation’s top 10 cities. It moved from sixth to fifth, trading places with Philadelphia, which is now the nation’s sixth-largest city.

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DECLINE IN CHILDREN, BUT GROWTH IN AGING BOOMERS

The share of children in the U.S. declined because of falling birth rates, while it grew for adults, driven by aging baby boomers. Adults over age 18 made up more than three-quarters of the population in 2020, or 258.3 million people, an increase of more than 10% from 2010. However, the population of children under age 18 dropped from 74.2 million in 2010 to 73.1 million in 2020, a 1.4% decrease. Nationwide, children under age 18 now make up around 22% of the population, but it varies by region. The Northeast had the smallest proportion of people under age 18, around 20%, while the South had the largest at 22.5%.

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HOUSING GROWTH RATE SLOWS

The housing growth rate slowed between 2010 and 2020, the result of a hangover from the 2008 housing bust. The total number of housing units in the U.S. grew by 6.7% over the decade — about half the rate of growth during the previous decade. Puerto Rico and West Virginia were the only two places that experienced drops in the housing stock over the decade.

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RAPID GROWTH IN UNEXPECTED PLACES

Among all U.S. metro areas, the fastest-growing one was in The Villages, the Florida retirement community built on former cow pastures. Other fast-growing areas in the U.S. were fueled by the energy boom, particularly in North Dakota, where McKenzie County was the country’s fastest-growing county. Its population increased by 131% from 2010 to 2020. Nearby Williams County, North Dakota, grew by 83%.

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While suburban congressional districts are swelling with new residents, lawmakers in large swaths of rural America and some Rust Belt cities are in need of more people to represent.

In rural Illinois, Republican Rep. Mary Miller’s district is short 73,000 people. In northeastern Ohio, Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan needs an additional 88,000 people. And the Detroit-area district of Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib lacks over 100,000 people — one of the biggest shortfalls in the country.

That makes them all potential targets for map makers — and possibly vulnerable to job loss — as their districts are redrawn in the coming months to rebalance the nation’s shifting population.

The numbers come from an Associated Press analysis of new 2020 census data revealing the boom of urban and suburban America, at the expense of small towns. The emptying out of rural areas was particularly rough news for Republicans, who have increasingly relied on rural voters to win seats in Congress. Of the 61 U.S. House districts that lost population, 35 are held by Republicans.

The party needs to net just five seats to win control of the House in 2022. But it is guaranteed to lose a seat in West Virginia, and likely to take hits in Illinois and New York.

However, Republicans are well positioned to make up those seats -- and possibly more -- in the growing states of Texas, Florida and North Carolina, where they control the mapmaking process. Fast growing areas, such as Republican-held congressional districts in suburban Texas, are fertile ground for adding new districts or spreading surplus Democratic voters among neighboring districts.



(On AP's site you can scroll on the map to get district level data.)



That tactic is among those certain to be contested both in the legislatures and in courts. Democrats on Friday wasted no time filing a fresh lawsuit challenging the current maps in Wisconsin, anticipating a redistricting stalemate in the divided state government and arguing the courts should intervene.

The political parties will be battling not just over where they can gain seats but also where they can eliminate seats held by their opponents. That means some of the toughest battles for mapmakers will occur over districts that have fewer residents than a decade ago, like those in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio — all states that will be losing a U.S. House seat because of lagging population.

Ohio will drop from 16 to 15 U.S. House seats with redistricting. Among the 10 districts with the largest population shortfalls, three were in Ohio, according to the AP analysis, based on the number of residents required per district.

That included Ryan’s district as well as Republican Rep. Bill Johnson’s eastern Ohio district and the Cleveland-area district of former Democratic Rep. Marcia Fudge, who resigned to join President Joe Biden’s administration. Fudge’s district, where Democrat Shontel Turner recently won the primary, is on the hunt for 94,000 more people.

Ryan’s district, though still voting for Democrats, has been trending toward Republicans in recent presidential elections.

Republicans, who control redistricting in Ohio, could “sort of dismember” Ryan’s district and place its residents in other nearby districts, said Paul Beck, a retired political science professor from Ohio State University. “I think that district is going to be on the cutting boards.”

Ryan has announced his plans to run for the U.S. Senate.

A lost Democratic district in Ohio wouldn’t necessarily result in a Republican gain, because the GOP still would have to defend 12 seats that it already holds.

Republicans are guaranteed to lose a congressional seat in West Virginia. That’s because they currently hold all three seats, and one must be eliminated in redistricting.

Another blow may be awaiting Republicans in Illinois, which must trim its congressional delegation from 18 to 17. Democrats who control redistricting there are almost certain to try to eliminate a district in heavily Republican areas of central and southern Illinois. All five of Illinois’ congressional districts held by Republicans lost population between 2010 and 2020, according to the census, giving Democrats the justification to get rid of one.

“I don’t think there’s going to be anything Republicans can do to stop that,” said Alvin Tillery Jr., an associate professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University.

A similar scenario could play out in New York, where Democrats also control redistricting and thus will hold sway over which seat must be eliminated.

The fight could be messier in Pennsylvania, where the state’s congressional delegation currently is split 9-9 between Democrats and Republicans. The GOP controls the Legislature, which will draft a new map eliminating one seat, but Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf holds veto power.

The rural Pennsylvania district of Republican Rep. Glenn Thompson ranks among the top 10 nationally in population shortfalls, needing to pick up over 90,000 people to meet the redistricting target. It’s one of six Pennsylvania districts that lost population in the 2020 census, all but one of which are held by Republicans.

Citizens’ commissions will be responsible for deciding how to eliminate one district each in California and Michigan. After the 2010 census, Michigan’s districts were drawn by a Republican-led Legislature and governor and provided the GOP one of the most enduring advantages in the nation, according to an AP analysis.

Michigan lost population in the 2020 census in some rural areas as well as in Detroit and Flint, which was scarred by a tainted water crises this past decade. The districts of Democratic Reps. Dan Kildee, who represents Flint, and Rashida Tlaib of Detroit each are more than 100,000 people short of the redistricting target — the largest gaps nationally outside of West Virginia.

If Republicans were still drawing the maps, one of those districts might be a likely target for elimination. But the state constitution says the citizens’ redistricting commission can neither favor nor disfavor incumbents. That means the new map could look significantly different.

“The commission is very unlikely to just sort of start from the current map and make small adjustments,” said Matt Grossmann, a political scientist who directs the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. “I really think they’re going to be closer to starting from scratch.”

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hanimmal said:

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SOMERTON, Ariz. (AP) — It’s a Thursday evening in Somerton, Arizona, and parents and students packed inside a middle school gym are roaring for the school’s wrestling team at decibels that test the eardrum.

The young wrestlers are seventh and eighth graders who will be among the first to attend this town’s first public high school, which was approved just weeks ago after years of lobbying by local officials. The overwhelmingly Hispanic community has grown enough over the last decade that it’s also building a new elementary school.

But the Census Bureau says Somerton actually lost 90 residents during the that time, putting its official population at 14,197 people, not the 20,000 that the mayor expected.

“So we’re trying to make sense of where these numbers are coming from, because they do not make sense whatsoever,” said City Manager Jerry Cabrera, who cited 853 new homes over the past decade as evidence of growth.

An accurate census is crucial for the distribution of hundreds of billions of federal dollars, and it determines how many congressional seats each state gets. But a review by The Associated Press found that in many places, the share of the Hispanic and Black populations in the latest census figures fell below recent estimates and an annual Census Bureau survey, suggesting that some areas were overlooked.

For the share of the Black population, the trend was most visible in southeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, including Alabama, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. For the Hispanic population, it was most noticeable in New Mexico and Arizona.

In Somerton, about 200 miles southwest of Phoenix near the Mexico border, community leaders were incredulous.

“This is not true. This is not real numbers, you know. They don’t know our community. They did not do what needed to be done to count our people, and it’s just ridiculous. It can’t be,” said Emma Torres, executive director of Campesinos Sin Fronteras, an organization that advocates for farmworkers. The group was heavily involved in promoting the census.

Most Somerton residents use post office boxes. A majority are Spanish-speaking farmworkers, and many lack reliable internet access.

Community leaders say they are used to an undercount, but the notion that they lost residents is unfathomable.

Here, where an annual tamale festival to raise money for college students attracts thousands of visitors, local schools are over capacity as enrollment grew by nearly 12% from 2010 to 2019. And after years of having to bus students at least 10 miles north to Yuma, Somerton finally met the threshold for its own high school.

While there is nothing new about undercounts, and no census is perfect, there is “strong evidence” that undercounts in the 2020 census are worse than in past decades, said Paul Ong, a public affairs professor at UCLA, whose own analysis of Los Angeles County this month concluded that Hispanics, Asians and other residents were undercounted.

“The big-picture implication is it will skew the redistricting process, our undercounted neighborhoods will be underrepresented and populations that are undercounted will be shortchanged when it comes to the allocation of federal spending,” Ong said.

The AP analysis comes with caveats. The Census Bureau says the census figures should be considered more accurate than the agency’s American Community Survey or vintage population estimates. Additionally, the American Community Survey has margins of error, and the population estimates are edited in a way that pushes some people who identified as “some other race” in the 2010 count into more traditional racial categories such as white, Black and Asian.

Bureau officials say it’s too soon to speculate on whether individual communities were undercounted. The full extent of whether the statistical agency missed certain populations, or overcounted others, won’t be known until early next year, when it releases results of a survey used to measure how good a job it did counting every U.S. resident.

Black and Hispanic communities historically are undercounted, and there was greater concern about an undercount in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which made people afraid to interact with strangers, and natural disasters, which made it difficult for census takers to reach some residents. There were also attempts at political interference by the Trump administration, including a failed attempt to add a citizenship question to the census form.

The AP review revealed figures that suggest some communities were overlooked.

Outside Baton Rouge, in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, for instance, the 2020 census figures show the share of the Black population to be 23.4%, but 2020 population estimates and the 2019 American Community Survey placed it at 44%. The area is home to the 5,500-inmate Louisiana State Penitentiary, and group housing like prisons, dorms and nursing homes were among the toughest places to count people during the census because of COVID-19-related restrictions.

In counties along the Colorado and New Mexico border, the share of the Hispanic population in the census was lower than those in the estimates and survey, anywhere from 4 to 7 percentage points.

The Census Bureau said in a statement that tribal, state and local governments can ask for a review of the numbers if they think they census figures are inaccurate, but that will not change the numbers used for redistricting or congressional seats.

“Despite facing a pandemic, natural disasters and other unforeseen challenges, the 2020 census results thus far are in line with overall benchmarks,” the statement said.

Cabrera said the city is pulling data to show that the 2020 count was off and plans to appeal.

Somerton Mayor Gerardo Anaya worries about the city’s share of state revenues. He says Somerton’s sales tax revenue, school enrollment and building permits have gone up in the past few years. Developers continue to build.

As it did in many Latino communities, the pandemic had an outsized effect in Somerton. Latinos were almost twice as likely to become infected and more than twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Somerton, few people have jobs they can do from home. Anaya says there was a point last summer when the Somerton zip code had the highest infection rate in Arizona.

“This time it was just chaotic here during the summer. We all had family members that were in the hospital or dying or infected with COVID. So it was very scary,” Anaya said.

Back at the home of the Somerton Middle School Cobras, Principal Jose Moreno bragged about his city’s tight-knit community, where wrestling is a source of pride. Moreno paced around the gym and joined the cheering as the young boys battled the San Luis Scorpions.

Moreno said finally meeting the threshold for a high school means local educators get to keep working with kids they have taught from kindergarten through eighth grade.

“I accept the challenge, I really do, in trying to continue the traditions that we have here at the middle school, in the city, in the things we value. And so you have that small-time feeling here, and you know we definitely want to keep that going,” Moreno said.

As for the match, the Cobras gave the Scorpions a whooping, beating them 90 to 6.

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