What happened?

The U.S. Census is hugely important. Getting the decennial count right means ensuring that communities across the country get the representation and resources that they deserve.

But in 2019, then-President Donald Trump and his administration sought to rig the 2020 Census for political gain by adding an untested, last-minute question about citizenship status.

Experts warned that including this question would discourage countless individuals who felt intimidated by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric—whether they were citizens or not—from filling out the survey. This would have led to a significant undercount, particularly of communities of color.

That means the Census data that we would have used to draw legislative districts, make spending decisions, and more wouldn’t have accurately reflected our population.

That is not how the Census should work. This process is required by law to count everyone who lives within the borders of our country, regardless of their citizenship status.

Why did Trump push this question?

The citizenship question was part of a long-term strategy by some Republican leaders to permanently rig American democracy in their favor.

Back in 2015, a Republican operative named Thomas Hofeller—once called “the Michelangelo of the modern gerrymander”—was hired by a Republican mega-donor to answer the question: what if the rules of redistricting were changed to draw legislative districts based on the number of voting citizens living in them, not the total number of people living in a state?

Hofeller understood that this change would be a “radical departure from the federal ‘one person, one vote’ rule presently used in the United State[s].” He even recognized that it would be hard to convince the Supreme Court to mandate this change, unless… he could figure out how to add a citizenship question to the upcoming 2020 Census.

Then, in the next round of redistricting, the plan was for Republicans to use that citizenship data to supercharge their partisan gerrymandering strategy. They would excise a large number of people out of redistricting altogether and pack the remaining Democrats and voters of color into as few districts as possible.

Who blocked the question?

After hundreds of thousands of calls, emails, and petition signatures from Common Cause members, the Department of Justice confirmed that the 2020 Census questionnaire would be printed without a question on citizenship status. This decision came just a week after the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s reason for including it as “contrived.”

What happens next?

Common Cause and our 1.5 million members and supporters will fight any attempt to draw legislative districts that do not include all people—because everyone in the U.S. deserves representation in our government.

One way to make sure this doesn’t happen again is to pass the Census IDEA Act. This legislation would mandate that all new Census questions undergo a three-year review process.