'census choices are weaponized to skew political power -- like prison gerrymandering.'.....

[riversedge]

I had no idea this was going on. Very informative article



All eyes are on the new citizenship question. But there are other ways that census choices are weaponized to skew political power — like prison gerrymandering. I wrote with @vgullap on how we count, & efforts to reform prison gerrymandering:

Link to tweet

How We Count People Skews Political Power


https://www.appealpolitics.org/2019/how-we-count-people-skews-political-power/
May 6, 2019 by appealpolitics, posted in prison gerrymandering, Washington State

The new citizenship question and the longstanding practice of prison gerrymandering weaponize the census to change the racial geography of power.

Vaidya Gullapalli and Daniel Nichanian

This article is a joint production of the Daily Appeal and the Appeal: Political Report.

In late April, the Supreme Court heard arguments in one of the most consequential cases of the term. Department of Commerce v. New York deals with the Trump administration’s decision to add a question asking about citizenship to the 2020 census. In the current political climate, when the federal government has prioritized deportations, adding such a question is expected to lead many noncitizens and their family members to not respond to the census. One study released by researchers at Harvard University projects an undercount of 4.2 million Latinx residents; other research projects significant undercounts as well. This will undermine the basic function of the census: an accurate count. That enumeration is, as Adam Liptak put it on a recent episode of the podcast The Daily, “the very cornerstone and foundation of our political system.”
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross testified about the 2020 census and the citizenship question before a House committee on March 14, 201. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The undercount would be significant enough that states with larger immigrant populations could end up with fewer seats in the House of Representatives than they should have. This dynamic will also play out within each state when the time comes to redraw political districts. An undercount will increase the number of districts in areas that do not have a major immigrant population, while also funneling more state and federal funding toward those districts.

The stakes are high: If this change to the decennial census is allowed it will translate into the dilution of political representation for diverse, immigrant-rich population centers and their inhabitants. And making a citizen count available could enable conservative states to distribute political representation based not on the number of people, but on the number of citizens. This, too, would lead to a shift in political power within states, away from more diverse areas.

The Supreme Court will decide whether to allow the change. In the meantime, though, the census already counts people in a way that dilutes the power of communities of color, and of urban areas, while inflating that of white and rural communities.

Despite longtime pleas from advocates, the Census Bureau will, for the 2020 census, continue to count people in prisons where they are incarcerated, and not at the home addresses where they lived before incarceration and where they will most likely return upon release. (The census adopted changes to treat some deployed military personnel and children in juvenile treatment facilities differently, and count them at their last home addresses.) Most states use this data to draw their districts, a practice known as prison gerrymandering. The result, given the concentration of prisons in rural districts, and the disproportionate imprisonment of people from urban areas and from communities of color, is “a systematic transfer of population and political clout from urban to rural areas,” writes the Prison Policy Initiative, as well as toward predominantly white ones.

Prison gerrymandering is just one of a set of practices that leaves the communities most targeted by the policies of mass incarceration with the least power to effect change at the ballot box. Large swaths of people are arrested and forcibly moved from predominantly nonwhite areas to predominantly white ones whose population totals, political representation, and funding they inflate. Simultaneously, since people incarcerated over felony convictions are barred from voting in all but Maine and Vermont, these people are denied any voice in the communities gaining power from their presence. They are “ghost constituents.” This policy “deflates the weight of votes in areas targeted for criminal justice enforcement … exacerbating the cycle of democratic exclusion,” wrote Julie Ebenstein, an attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, in a 2018 law review article. ...............................