Tag: 2020 census

Lawsuit pushes Minnesota’s redistricting process into the courts, where it was likely to end up anyway

The purpose of the lawsuit is to put the issue before the courts in case the Legislature can’t agree on new political maps — which is highly likely.

It’s like the ceremonial first pitch at the start of baseball season.

Monday, a handful of plaintiffs — including redistricting expert Peter Wattson and former Ramsey County elections supervisor Joe Mansky — filed a lawsuit in state court arguing that Minnesota’s current legislative and congressional districts are unconstitutional. The reason: they are no longer of equal population.

That’s not really contested. Ten years after the last U.S. Census and the last redrawing of legislative and congressional district maps, population growth and changes in in-state migration have left some districts with more people than average — and some with fewer. That’s why the Census was done again last year, and why state lawmakers are preparing to redraw the lines based on the new population numbers. Continue reading.

Political mapmaking heads to familiar spot: Minnesota’s courts

Legal wrangling has begun over new Minnesota congressional and legislative district boundaries stemming from the 2020 census with the filing of a new lawsuit.

Every 10 years the political maps are redrawn to account for population shifts, with a goal of making each type of district roughly equal in size.

Since the 1970s in Minnesota, it’s a process that has spilled into the courts and resulted in judges dictating the layout. Continue reading.

The Gerrymander Battles Loom, as G.O.P. Looks to Press Its Advantage

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With new census results coming, Republicans control redistricting in key states, while Democrats prepare for legal challenges and look to redraw some maps of their own.

WASHINGTON — With the election over and Democrats in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, officials in both parties are bracing for a bruising new battle with a different balance of power: the redrawing of congressional maps, where Republicans hold the advantage in many state legislatures across the country, including in key battlegrounds.

Republicans hold total control of redistricting in 18 states, including Florida, North Carolina and Texas, which are growing in population and expected to gain seats after the 2020 census is tabulated. Some election experts believe the G.O.P. could retake the House in 2022 based solely on gains from newly drawn districts.

Already, Republicans are discussing redrawing two suburban Atlanta districts held by Democrats to make one of them more Republican; slicing Democratic sections out of a Houston district that Republicans lost in 2018; and carving up a northeastern Ohio district held by Democrats since 1985. Continue reading.

Census Bureau to miss deadline, jeopardizing Trump plan

The Census Bureau will miss a year-end deadline for handing in numbers used for divvying up congressional seats, a delay that could undermine President Donald Trump’s efforts to exclude people in the country illegally from the count if the figures aren’t submitted before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

The Census Bureau plans to deliver a population count of each state in early 2021, as close to the missed deadline as possible, the statistical agency said in a statement late Wednesday.

“As issues that could affect the accuracy of the data are detected, they are corrected,” the statement said. “The schedule for reporting this data is not static. Projected dates are fluid.” Continue reading.

Supreme Court tosses challenge to Trump’s immigrant census plan

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The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Friday to dismiss a challenge to the Trump administration’s exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the U.S. census, the once-per-decade population count used to allocate House seats among the states.

The decision broke along ideological lines, with the court’s six conservative justices finding that the lawsuit brought by nearly two dozen states was premature. The court’s three more liberal members dissented.

If the courts take no further action on President Trump’s plan, the Friday ruling would effectively allow him to subtract undocumented residents from his mandatory January apportionment report to Congress, which could reduce House seats and federal funding among states with large undocumented populations.  Continue reading.

Census delays could push apportionment to Biden administration

Internal census documents reveal errors involving more than 900,000 records nationwide

Internal documents released Wednesday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee show the Census Bureau has run into far more problems than publicly disclosed in its rush to finish tabulating results from the 2020 count, possibly resulting in delays that would let the incoming Biden administration have final control over results.

The documents identify errors involving more than 900,000 records across the country. The problems vary from calculating ages correctly to missing or double counting thousands of people. Agency officials have also identified problems in tens of thousands of records in states on the verge of gaining or losing congressional seats, such as Texas and California.

Correcting those problems will require several delays, according to the documents the committee released Wednesday as part of three sets of internal Census presentation slides dated mid-to-late November. Continue reading.

Rematches key to control of the Minnesota Legislature

The contest for control of the Minnesota Legislature is underway, and several of the campaigns for House and Senate seats feature candidates who have run against each other in previous elections. 

Take, for example, the matchup in House District 5A in northern Minnesota, which is between two candidates who know each other well.

Back in 2016, Rep. John Persell, DFL-Bemidji, lost his reelection bid to Matt Bliss of Pennington. Persell ran again two years later and defeated Bliss, but not by much. He won by just 11 votes Continue reading.

With Census Count Finishing Early, Fears of a Skewed Tally Rise

New York Times logoWith 60 million households still uncounted, the bureau said it would wrap up the survey a month early. Critics called it a bald move to politicize the count in favor of Republicans.

WASHINGTON — With the Trump administration’s decision to end the 2020 census count four weeks early, the Census Bureau now has to accomplish what officials have said it cannot do: accurately count the nation’s hardest-to-reach residents — nearly four of every 10 households — in just six weeks.

The result is both a logistical challenge of enormous proportions that must take place in the middle of a pandemic, and yet another political crisis for the census, historically a nonpartisan enterprise. The announcement, which came Monday evening, immediately generated sharp criticism.

On Tuesday, four former directors of the Census Bureau issued a statement warning that an earlier deadline would “result in seriously incomplete enumerations in many areas across our country,” and urged the administration to restore the lost weeks. The directors, who served under Democratic and Republican presidents, also urged Congress to assemble a trusted body of experts to develop standards for assessing the quality of the bureau’s population totals. Continue reading.

Congressman Dean Phillips: Make Sure You Count

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Dear Neighbors,

In Article I of the Constitution, our Founding Fathers set forth a bold plan to hold our government accountable to the people by counting every person living in the United States. The Census ensures that everybody is adequately represented in our democracy. The results of the 2020 Census, which is active now, will impact Minnesota families for the next decade.

The 2020 Census is still moving forward during the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, it’s even easier to make your voice heard – for the first time, you can take the Census online! Complete the Census online or by mail today to avoid the need for a Census worker to come to your home. Continue reading “Congressman Dean Phillips: Make Sure You Count”

The 2020 fight to control the Minnesota Senate will focus on just a few seats. And it’s already started.

After winning close races in difficult districts in 2016, two Minnesota state senators didn’t have long to celebrate. Almost immediately, they rose to the top of an unenviable list: opposing parties’ most prominent targets in the 2020 election.

DFL Sen. Matt Little of Lakeville is the No. 1 target for Republicans hoping to hang on to their narrow majority in the state Senate next year. And GOP Sen. Paul Anderson of Plymouth has the same distinction for DFLers hoping to retake the chamber. As a result, both freshmen spent their first terms knowing everything done by them — and to them — could be a factor in the 2020 campaign.

But there is a significant difference between their situations.

View the complete October 9 article by Peter Callaghan on the MinnPost website here.