Republicans sparred with Democrats during a Capitol Hill hearing Dec. 5 over significant miscounts in the 2020 Census. Republicans said those miscounts benefited blue states, and they renewed calls to prevent illegal immigrants from being counted in the future.
Thursday’s hearing, “Oversight of the U.S. Census Bureau,” focused on how the population in 14 states was substantially miscounted in 2020, impacting the appropriation of congressional seats, the electoral college vote, and how federal dollars are allocated.
According to the 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey, undercounted states were Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas.
Overcounted states were Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Utah.
Robert Santos, director of the Census Bureau, testified at the hearing that no census was perfect and that the bureau had taken steps to modernize the process. To minimize errors, workers took steps to address situations where residents might have been reluctant to participate in the census, he said.
Santos said current law mandates that residents be counted regardless of citizenship status.
Under the Biden administration, more than 10 million illegal immigrants have crossed into the United States, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
Rep. James Comer, (R-Ky.) chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, which held the hearing, noted that the 2020 census was “flawed in ways not seen in prior censuses” and that errors predominantly went one way—against Republicans.
“So many mistakes that are made, big mistakes in this town, always just mysteriously benefit Democrats at the expense of Republicans,” he said.
Undercounting in the red states of Texas and Florida likely cost those states a congressional seat, Comer said. On the other hand, the blue states of Rhode Island and Minnesota likely should have lost a seat but didn’t, he said.
With a razor-thin Republican majority in the U.S. House, who gets counted and how they are counted has come under scrutiny looking toward the 2030 census.
Under the first Trump administration, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked efforts by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.
With millions of illegal immigrants pouring into the country under the Biden administration, Comer said the Senate needed to pass the Equal Representation Act. The House passed the bill, which added the question of citizenship to the census, earlier this year.
“It also ensures that only U.S. citizens are counted for apportionment of congressional seats and electoral college votes,” Comer said.
Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.), who has an engineering background, questioned the methodology used to help estimate the population in the 2020 census.
He said it would be a statistical anomaly for only red state residents to be undercounted and requested data from the Census Bureau on how the estimations were calculated.
“We are confident that the methodology was solid and that there are no anomalies,” Santos responded.
Democrats called Republicans’ concerns conspiracy theories and noted that President-elect Donald Trump was serving his first term at the time of the 2020 census.
Ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for part of the miscounts in 2020. He pointed out that college students may have been counted twice if they left their dorms and returned home as one example of how miscounting could happen.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Republicans at the hearing were alluding to “some deep state conspiracy to try to somehow change or manipulate the U.S. census counts.”
Ocasio-Cortez said since the first Trump administration was in charge in 2020, the Republicans only have themselves to blame for problems with the census.
Other Democrats pointed out that many people who entered the country illegally reside in the state of Texas, which benefited politically with two additional congressional seats.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) suggested that putting a citizenship question on the census would make those crossing the border unlawfully less likely to respond for fear of being deported.
She said Texas gained two “white Republican seats” in Congress after the census, thanks to new “black and brown and Asian” residents who were part of the 4 million people who moved to the state over the previous decade.
Other Democrats said it is dishonest to neglect counting people because of their immigration status.
Rep. Melanie A. Stansbury (D-N.M.) said that everyone but native Americans is an immigrant in the United States.
“So the arguments that we’re hearing this morning that immigrants should not be counted is un-American,” she said.
