Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) is demanding answers and a probe into major errors by the U.S. Census Bureau that hurt Republicans.
Five predominantly Republican-led states—Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennesee, and Texas—were undercounted.
Arkansas saw the largest undercount at more than 5 percent. Texas was undercounted by 1.92 percent, depriving the state of another congressional seat and electoral vote.
In Florida, there are enough voters that the state should have received two more congressional seats than it actually got.
At the same time, the bureau substantially overcounted several Democrat-led states, including Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, Colorado, and Delaware. While Republican states lost three seats, overcounted Democrat states kept or got new seats because of the error.
Minnesota and Rhode Island each kept a seat that, by population, they shouldn’t have, while Colorado gained a seat that it shouldn’t have.
By contrast, only two Republican-led states—Ohio and Utah—were slightly overcounted. Neither received seats because of the miscount.
Illinois was also miscounted.
Nehls Demands Answers
In a letter to Census Bureau Director Robert L. Santos, Nehls demanded answers.“It has come to my attention that the U.S. Census Bureau significantly undercounted the populations of [states] which primarily vote Republican, and overcounted the populations of [states] which primarily vote Democrat. As a result, these blue states will now have more representation in Congress, more votes in the Electoral College, and may well receive more federal funds than they should,” Nehls wrote.
These results are “deeply concerning for the legitimacy of our Democracy,” he wrote.
Nehls contended that these results weren’t merely the result of simple human error.
“I do not believe this was a coincidence, as the Bureau has failed to provide any explanation for this severe undercounting and overcounting,” he wrote.
Nehls expanded on this statement in comments to Just the News, accusing the Census Bureau of being politically motivated.
“This wasn’t a coincidence, because things like this don’t just happen,” he said. “The bureaucrats in Washington have an agenda. They want Democrats in power and won’t let anything get in their way. We must get to the bottom of what happened.”
Nehls closed out his letter with a series of questions to the director of the bureau.
The Texas Republican asked Santos to give a specific explanation of the errors, as well as the steps being taken by the agency to understand the cause of the inaccuracy. Nehls further queried Santos about the agency’s plans to ensure that these errors don’t happen again.
He also asked Santos to explain the wide divergence from the 2010 census’s results, which were much less error-riddled. In 2010, the census saw a “statistically insignificant error rate of only 0.01 percent,” Nehls noted.
In another question, he asked the director if the agency had received instructions from the White House to take different measures than it did in 2010.
Nehls noted that his own home state “was cheated out of an additional member of Congress” while “states like Minnesota and Rhode Island kept seats they should have lost if not for overcounting.”
“For the sake of a legitimate democracy, we must ensure that the necessary changes are made to prevent this from happening again,” he wrote.
Nehls’s office told The Epoch Times that the Census Bureau has confirmed receipt of the letter, but that his office is still awaiting responses to the questions.
After announcing the results of their post-election survey, census officials said they were disappointed by the errors, but insisted that fully accurate counts are difficult. The agency stated that these difficulties were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although the count is now confirmed to have been off, coming out to as much as a six-vote discrepancy, there’s little that can be done to correct the errors.
The census has already been wrapped up for the decade and won’t be recounted until 2030.
