In a matter of days, the Supreme Court may dramatically change the census. The court is slated to rule on whether the Trump administration can add a question about citizenship to the 2020 form. When the case was argued back in April, many court-watchers predicted that the court’s five conservative justices were ready to side with the administration. The proposal sounds innocuous enough, but social scientists and civil rights advocates worry it will deter vulnerable populations — particularly undocumented people, other immigrants and their families — from answering the census. If that happens, many people from these groups will be at risk of not being counted and huge swaths of American life will be affected. The results of the count determine everything from where grocery stores are placed to how congressional representatives are distributed.
There are few things we care more about around here than political apportionment (although, if we’re being honest, we care an awful lot about groceries, too). So we went in search of researchers who had estimated the potential effect of the citizenship question. We found several, none of whom agreed on just how big an impact this would have. But they were all on the same page about one thing — if the Supreme Court rules that the new question can be included, it could alter our political future.
Every 10 years, the updated census numbers are used to determine how many U.S. House members each state will get. So figuring out who might be missed and where can tell us a lot about who stands to gain political representation and who stands to lose. Forecasting that amounts to sophisticated guesswork, since the question hasn’t yet been field-tested by the Census Bureau — a decision that many experts regard as a scientific cardinal sin. But that hasn’t stopped researchers from trying to fill the void.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...t-in-congress/
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Originally Posted by Adelaide
