Every decade, the Federal government conducts a count of how many of us there are in America. Article I, Section 2 of the U.S Constitution requires this.
The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.
The “enumeration” is mandatory and Congress has actually passed a law governing how and when the data is released to the states. The 2020 data was to be delivered to the President by the Census Bureau by December 31, 2020. But that was delayed until today, 1 April 2021. The release of that data has been further delayed until 30 September 2021, putatively because of the disruption COVID has played in conducting the counts.
Nevertheless, the count was indeed completed in 2020 and it should have been available to the states three months ago. Why? Because state legislatures use the census data to reapportion the legislative districts in those states to ensure that each district contains the same number of people (within a tiny margin) to be represented at the state and Federal level. That’s the process called “redistricting.”
Redistricting has had a sordid history involving what is termed “gerrymandering,” whereby the majority political party in a particular legislature skews the size and shape of a district to include the right number of partisan voters to reelect the majority and sustain their power. Even in the best of circumstances where genuine efforts are made to be fair to all concerned, the legislatures tend to be partisan when it comes to redrawing districts.
Some states—now including Virginia—use non-partisan redistricting commissions that are made up of equal numbers for both major political parties to redraw legislative boundaries. In my home state of Virginia, voters approved in 2020 a constitutional amendment requiring non-partisan redistricting so that the state legislative races in November 2021 would use new lines not drawn solely by a particular party.
However, regardless of whether a state uses the traditional partisan approach or non-partisan commissions, all of them needed that data from the Census Bureau to do their work, something that should have already been completed by now. Why?
For states like Virginia and New Jersey—which have their state legislative races in odd-numbered years—there is an urgency to complete the work in time for candidates to conduct primaries or conventions in the Spring of those odd years, so that candidates are selected to stand in time for the November elections. The remaining 48 states have a bit more flexibility, but even those want to get the work done soon so that potential candidates in 2022 can properly prepare for the selection process and the eventual Fall election.
Unfortunately, Virginia is now faced with having to conduct its election in November of this year under the old legislative lines developed a decade ago. In other words, the delay in releasing the census date has made it impossible for Virginia and New Jersey to comply with the law. The result will be that legislators elected in 2021 will not represent a valid and uniform number of citizens across their states. It also means that there will likely be a special election inside new district lines as soon as the redistricting process is completed late in 2021. That means the Virginia House of Delegates will have normally scheduled legislative races in 2021 under the old lines; a special election in 2022 under the new lines; and again in 2023 when another normally scheduled election occurs as it does every two years. Three elections, back-to-back, all because the Federal government under the current administration has decided to delay release of the census data.
It didn’t need to be this way. The data has been known since New Year’s Day 2021. It should be in the hands of the states right now. And in particular, available to at least Virginia and New Jersey so they can do what is expected in the redistricting process. But don’t be fooled. The delay has nothing to do with “getting the count right” as some in the current Administration might claim. It’s about giving partisans at the Federal level time to skew the data to include in those counts noncitizens and illegal aliens so that those politicians who depend on manipulated numbers benefit in the configuration of their legislative lines. In a fashion, this amounts to Federally mandated “gerrymandering.” Districts with larger numbers of non-citizens who can’t vote will nonetheless be included in a district’s count resulting in a much smaller number of legal voters who can be conveniently and sufficiently partisan enough to elect partisan legislators.
The non-census is complete nonsense. It’s time for a lawsuit to release the data.
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