Sunday, August 21, 2022

GOP Needs to Demand Answers for Big Mistake That Is Likely to Hurt Them in Midterms


Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

We’ve seen the politicization of the FBI and we’ve seen how that can create a two-tier system of justice. We’ve seen how it can even adversely impact the former president of the United States. The latest leak even suggests that the FBI may have conducted the raid to grab Russia probe documents.

But that’s not the only place where there may be issues. There’s another arena that’s going to have a big bad impact on Republicans in elections. It hasn’t been getting a lot of attention — but it has to, if we’re going to rectify the problem.

In a shocking report, the U.S. Census Bureau recently admitted that it overcounted the populations of eight states and undercounted the populations of six states in the 2020 census.

All but one of the states overcounted is a blue state, and all but one of the undercounted states is red.

Those costly errors will distort congressional representation and the Electoral College. It means that when the Census Bureau reapportioned the House of Representatives, Florida was cheated out of two additional seats it should have gotten; Texas missed out on another seat; Minnesota and Rhode Island each kept a representative they shouldn’t have; and Colorado was awarded a new member of the House it didn’t deserve.

So you mean it shorted the red states out of representatives (not to mention federal funds) in a very significant way that would adversely impact the elections? Gee, how did that happen? Especially when they didn’t happen in the prior census? Three guesses whose state had the biggest overcount?

After each census, the bureau interviews a large number of households across the country and then compares the interview answers with the original census responses. The 2020 survey showed that the bureau overcounted the population in Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Utah. The largest mistake was in President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware, which was overcounted by 5.45%.

The states whose populations were undercounted were Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. The largest error in the undercount was in Arkansas, where the population count was off by 5.04%.

The original census reported that Florida needed only 171,500 more residents to gain another congressional seat. Yet the survey shows that Florida was undercounted by over three-quarters of a million people. The bureau also said that Texas needed only 189,000 more people to gain another congressional seat. The survey shows that Texas was undercounted by 560,319 residents.

Minnesota, according to the original census report, would have lost a congressional seat during reapportionment if it had 26 fewer residents; the survey shows the state was overcounted by 216,971 individuals. Similarly, Rhode Island would have lost a seat if the Census Bureau had counted 19,000 fewer residents. It turns out that the state was overcounted by more than 55,000 individuals.

This is a mistake not just that adversely impacts these midterms but all the elections and federal allocation of money for the next ten years until the next census. They had one duty and they massively messed up. Congress needs to rake people over the coals for this so someone answers up as to how this happened, so they make sure it doesn’t happen again and appropriate action is taken. Unfortunately, given how we’ve seen the Democrat operatives seem to infiltrate areas that are supposed to be objective, I no longer trust that politics aren’t influencing these things.