Census

Previously undisclosed documents obtained by Common Cause in its North Carolina partisan gerrymandering lawsuit were filed today in the federal action challenging the addition a citizenship question to the 2020 Decennial Census. The documents, which were filed by the private plaintiffs in Department of Commerce v. State of New York, reveal for the first time the secret role played by the longtime Republican redistricting expert, the late Dr. Thomas Hofeller, in orchestrating the addition of the citizenship question and the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Act rationale for it. The documents further show that Dr. Hofeller concluded in a 2015 study that the citizenship question would significantly harm the political power of Latino communities and be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”   

“If we miss our opportunity right now, we have to wait another decade to fix the problems,” said Jay Young, executive director of Common Cause Illinois, a Chicago-based nonprofit that promotes government reform. “Some of those folks are going to disappear into the shadows.”

“For every person we miss, every community we undercount, and all the groups we ignore, that will have a tremendous impact on the federal program funding, critical data for business owners, and building an improved Pennsylvania,” Micah Sims, a 2020 Census Complete Count commissioner and executive director of the good-government group Common Cause Pennsylvania, said in a statement Monday.

I've always been fascinated by politics. My time in prison in West Virginia enhanced that. Now I'm fighting for #FairMaps and against all kinds of racial-, partisan-, and prison-gerrymandering. Hey-Hey, Ho-Ho, gerrymandering has got to go!

“The tragedy of it all is that the communities that are the hardest to count are the ones that are yearning to be seen by their government,” said Georgia Logothetis, assistant director of the nonprofit group Common Cause Illinois, which works on democracy, voting rights and gerrymandering issues. "We’re talking children, people living below the poverty line, minorities and immigrants,” Logothetis added. “For every 1% of people that were not counted in the last census, Illinois lost $122 million in health and human services funding.” Illinois could also have less representation and political power, as the state stands to lose one or two congressional seats if under-counted in next year’s census. “This is a true chance for every single person to be counted,” Logothetis said. “In the eyes of the government, if you don’t respond to the census, you don’t exist.”